The Progress of Love

help, but had not offered since he started on the car.
    Glenna had said, “I think he started thinking about the car when he realized he wasn’t going to live with us in the house.”
    Colin said, “Ross always fooled around with cars.”
    But Ross had never cared so much before about what a car looked like. He had cared about the getaway speed and top speed and whatever menacing or ridiculous-sounding noise he could force out of it. He had had two accidents. Once, he rolled his car into a ditch and walked away without a scratch. Another time, he had taken a shortcut, as he said, through a vacant lot in town and run into a heap of junk that included an old bathtub. When Colin came home from college on the weekend, there was Ross with purple bruises along the side of his face, a cut over one ear, and his ribs taped.
    “I had a collision with a bathtub.”Had he been drunk, or high?
    “I don’t think so,” said Ross.
    This time he seemed to have something else in mind than gunning the engine and fishtailing down the street, leaving a trail of burn marks on the pavement. He wanted a real car, what the magazine he read called a “street car.” Could that be to get girls? Or just to show himself off in, driving in a respectable style with an occasional flash of speed or powerful growl when he took off at the lights? Maybe this time he could even do without a trick horn.
    “This is one car isn’t going to be run up and down the main street like a maniac or hittin’ a hundred on the gravel,” he said.
    “That’s right, Ross,” said Glenna. “Time you graduated.”
    “Beer,” said Colin, and put it down where Ross could reach.
    “Ross?” said Glenna. (“Thank you,” she said to Colin.) “Ross, you’re going to have to rip the carpet off the doors. You are. It looks okay but really it stinks. I can smell it. Over here.”
    Colin sat on the step with Lynnette on one knee, knowing he wasn’t going to bring up the matter of being on time, let alone the hats. He wasn’t going to remind Ross that this was the first job he’d had in over a year. He was too tired, and now he felt too peaceful. Some of this peacefulness was Glenna’s doing. Glenna didn’t ally herself with anybody who was completely weird, or with any futile undertaking. And there she was, looking at her face in the caps, sniffing the carpet panels, taking Ross and his car seriously—so seriously that when Colin first got out of the car and saw her squatted down, polishing, he had felt like asking if this was the way things were going to go all summer, with her so involved with Ross’s car she wouldn’t have time to work on the house. He’d be kicking himself now if he’d said that. What would he do if she didn’t like Ross, if she hadn’t liked him from the start and agreed to have him around? When Ross said what the one thing wrong was, at their first meeting, and Glenna smiled, not politely or condescendingly but with true surprise and pleasure, Colin had felt more than relief. He had felt as if from now on Ross could stop being a secret weight on him; he would have someone to share Ross with. He had never counted Sylvia.
    The other thought that had crossed Colin’s mind was dirty inevery sense of the word. Ross never would. Ross was a prude. He glowered and stuck his big lip out and looked as if he half felt like crying when there was a sexy scene at the movies.
    On Saturday morning, there was a large package of chicken pieces thawing on the counter, reminding Colin that Glenna had asked Sylvia and Eddy and her friend—their friend—Nancy to come over for supper.
    Glenna had gone to the hospital, walking, with Lynnette in the stroller, to get her hay-fever shots. Ross was already working. He had come into the house and put a tape on, leaving the door open so that he could hear it. Chariots of Fire . That was Glenna’s. Ross usually listened to country and Western.
    Colin was just home from the builders’-supply store, where they didn’t have his ceiling panels in yet, in spite of promises. He went out to look at the grass he had planted last Saturday, a patch of lawn to the side of the house, fenced off with string. He gave it some water, then watched Ross sanding the wheels. Before long and without quite intending to, he was sanding as well. It was hypnotizing, as Glenna had said; you just kept on at it. After they were sufficiently sanded down, the wheels had to be painted with primer (the tires protected from that