The Progress of Love

over their desks but keeping their ears open. Colin had a gym class going on at the moment—he had just come into the office to find out what had happened about a boy who had begged off sick half an hour before—and he hadn’t expected to find Davidson prowling around here. He hadn’t come prepared to provide explanations about Ross.
    “Is he a forgetful kind of person?” the principal said.
    “No more than average.”
    “Maybe it’s supposed to be funny.”
    Colin was silent.
    “I’ve got a sense of humor myself but you can’t start being funny around kids. You know the way they are. They’ll see enough to laugh at anyway, without giving them extra. They’ll make any little thing an excuse for distraction and then you know what you’ve got.”
    “You want me to go out and talk to him?” Colin said.
    “Leave it for now. There’s probably a couple of classrooms already have their eye on him and that’d just get them more interested. Mr. Box can speak to him if somebody has to. Actually, Mr. Box was mentioning him.”
    Coonie Box was the school janitor, who had hired Ross for the spring cleanup of the grounds.
    “Oh? What?” said Colin.
    “He says your brother keeps his own hours a bit.”
    “Does he do the work all right?”
    “He didn’t say he didn’t.” Davidson gave Colin one of his tight-lipped, dismissive, much-imitated smiles. “Just that he’s inclined to be independent.”
    Colin and Ross looked rather alike, being tall, as their father had been, and fair-skinned and fair-haired, like their mother. Colin was athletic, with a shy, severe expression. Ross, though younger, was soft around the middle; he had a looser look. And he had an expression that seemed both leering and innocent.
    Ross was not retarded. He had kept up with his age group in school. His mother said he was a genius of the mechanical kind. Nobody else would go that far.
    “So? Is Ross getting used to getting up in the morning? Has he got an alarm?” Colin said to his mother.
    “They’re lucky to have him,” Sylvia said.
    Colin hadn’t known whether he’d find her at home. She workedshifts as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, and when she wasn’t working she was often out. She had a lot of friends and commitments.
    “And you’re lucky I’m in,” she said. “I’m on the early shift this week and next, but usually I go over to Eddy’s after work and do a bit of housecleaning for him.”
    Eddy was Sylvia’s boyfriend, a dapper seventy-year-old, twice a widower, with no children and plenty of money, a retired garage owner and car dealer who could certainly have afforded to hire somebody to clean his house. What did Sylvia know about house-cleaning, anyway? All last summer, she had kept the winter plastic tacked up over her front windows to save the trouble of putting it up again. Colin’s wife, Glenna, said that it gave her the same feeling as bleary glasses—she couldn’t stand it. And the house—the same Insul-brick-covered cottage Sylvia and Ross and Colin had always lived in—was so full of furniture and junk some rooms had turned into passageways. Most surfaces were piled high with magazines, newspapers, plastic and paper bags, catalogues, circulars, and fliers for sales that had come and gone, in some cases for businesses that had folded and products that had disappeared from the market. In any ashtray or ornamental dish you might find a button or two, keys, cutout coupons promising ten cents off, an earring, a cold capsule still in its plastic wrap, a vitamin pill turning to powder, a mascara brush, a broken clothespin. And Sylvia’s cupboards were full of all kinds of cleaning fluids and polishes—not the regular kind bought in stores, but products supposedly of unique and dazzling effectiveness, signed for at parties. She was kept broke paying for all the things she had signed for at parties—cosmetics, pots and pans, baking utensils, plastic bowls. She loved giving and going to those parties, also bridal showers and baby showers, and goodbye showers for her co-workers leaving the hospital. Here in these deeply cluttered rooms, she had dispensed, on her own, a great deal of careless, hopeful hospitality.
    She poured water from the kettle onto the powdered coffee in their cups, which she had rinsed lightly at the sink.
    “Was it boiling?” said Colin.
    “Near enough.”
    She shook some pink-and-white marshmallow cookies out of their plastic package.
    “I told Eddy I needed the