The Progress of Love

Ross. “I’ll have to see about renting one.”
    “Also, I lived with a guy who was involved with cars and you know what he did? When he had to rent a steamer, he used to ask around to see if anybody else wanted it done, and then he’d charge them ten dollars. So he made money on the rent.”
    “Yeah,” Ross said.
    “Just suggesting. You’ll need a different radiator brace, won’t you? V-8s mount the radiator behind the brace.”
    After that Ross came out of his sulk—he saw he might as well—and started showing her things.
• • •
    “Come on, Colin,” Nancy said. “Glenna says we need more whipping cream. We can go in my car. You hold Lynnette.”
    “I haven’t got a shirt on,” said Colin.
    “Lynnette doesn’t care. I’ll go into the store. Come on. Glenna wants it now.”
    In the car she said, “I wanted to talk to you.”
    “I figured that.”
    “It’s about Ross. About what he’s doing.”
    “You mean him going around in those hats? What? What did Davidson say?”
    “I don’t mean anything about that. I mean that car.”
    Colin was relieved. “What about the car?”
    “That engine. Colin, that engine is too big. He can’t put that engine in that body.”
    Her voice was dramatically deep and calm.
    “Ross knows quite a bit about cars,” Colin said.
    “I believe you. I never said Ross was dumb. He does know. But that engine, if he puts it in, I’m afraid it will simply break the drive shaft—not immediately but sooner or later. And sooner rather than later. Kids do that a lot. They put in a big powerful engine for the pickup and speed they want, and one day, you know, really, it can take the whole car over. It literally flips it over. Breaks the shaft. The thing is, with kids, something else often goes wrong first or they wreck it up. So he could have done this before and gotten away with it. Thought he was getting away with it. I’m not just doing the big expert, Colin. I swear to God I’m not.”
    “Okay,” said Colin. “You’re not.”
    “You know I’m not? Colin?”
    “I know you’re not.”
    “I just could not bring myself to say anything to Ross. He is so steamed up about it. That’s what they say here, isn’t it? Steamed up? I couldn’t come out with a major criticism like that. Anyway, he might not believe me.”
    “I don’t know if he’d believe me,” said Colin. “Look. You are dead sure?”
    “Don’t say dead!” Nancy begged him, in that phony-sounding voice he had to believe was sincere. “I am absolutely and undeniably sure and if I wasn’t I would not have opened my big mouth.”
    “He knows he’s putting in a bigger engine. He knows that. He must figure it’s all right.”
    “He figures wrong. Colin, I love Ross. I don’t want to upset his project.”
    “You better not let Sylvia hear you say that.”
    “Say what? She doesn’t want him killed, either.”
    “That you love Ross.”
    “I love you all, Colin,” said Nancy, pulling into the Mac’s Milk lot. “I really do.”
    “This is what I did, I’ll tell you,” said Sylvia, speaking mostly to Nancy, after a fourth glass of rosé. “I gave myself a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. What do you think of that?”
    “Marvellous!” said Nancy. Sylvia had just told her the joke about the black man and white man at the urinal, and Colin could see that it had given her some difficulty.
    “I mean, without a husband. I mean, he wasn’t still living with me. I wasn’t still living with him. He was still living. In Peterborough. He isn’t still living now. But I said, ‘I have been married twenty-five years, and I still am married. So don’t I deserve to have a party?’ ”
    Nancy said, “Certainly.”
    They were sitting at the picnic table out in the back yard, just a few steps from the kitchen door, under the blossoming black-cherry tree. Glenna had spread a white cloth and used her wedding china.
    “This will be a patio by next year,” Glenna said.
    “See,” said Sylvia. “If you had’ve used plastic, you could scoop all this up now and put it in the garbage.”
    Eddy lit Sylvia’s cigarette. He himself had not stopped smoking throughout the meal.
    Nancy picked a soggy strawberry out of the ruined crown of meringue. “It’s lovely here now,” she said.
    “At least no bugs yet,” said Glenna.
    Sylvia said, “True. Strawberries would have been a lot cheaper by next week, but you couldn’t’ve ate out here because of the bugs.”
    That seemed funny to