The Progress of Love

with new windows, porches, wings, and decks, that it was hard to find true mates anymore. The Weebles’ house had been built as a mirror image of the Kuipers’, but the front window had been changed, its Christmas-card panes taken out, and the roof had been lifted, so that there was a large upstairs window overlooking the street. The siding was pale green and the trim white, and there were no shutters.
    The side door opened into a utility room, just as Peg’s door did at home. She knocked lightly at first, thinking that they would be in the kitchen, which was only a few steps up from the utility room. She had noticed the car, of course, and wondered if they had got home late and were sleeping in. (She hadn’t thought yet about the snow’s not having been shovelled, and the fact that the plow hadn’t been past in the night. That was something that occurred to her later on when she got into her own car and backed it out.) She knocked louder and louder. Her face was stinging already in the bright cold. She tried the door and found that it wasn’t locked. She opened it and stepped into shelter and called.
    The little room was dark. There was no light to speak of coming down from the kitchen, and there was a bamboo curtain over the side door. She set the eggs on the clothes dryer, and was going to leave them there. Then she thought she had better take them up into the kitchen, in case the Weebles wanted eggs for breakfast and had run out. They wouldn’t think of looking in the utility room.
    (This, in fact, was Robert’s explanation to himself. She didn’tsay all that, but he forgot she didn’t. She just said, “I thought I might as well take them up to the kitchen.”)
    The kitchen had those same bamboo curtains over the sink window and over the breakfast-nook windows, which meant that though the room faced east, like the Kuipers’ kitchen, and though the sun was fully up by this time, not much light could get in. The day hadn’t begun here.
    But the house was warm. Perhaps they’d got up a while ago and turned up the thermostat, then gone back to bed. Perhaps they left it up all night—though they had seemed to Peg to be thriftier than that. She set the eggs on the counter by the sink. The layout of the kitchen was almost exactly the same as her own. She noticed a few dishes stacked, rinsed, but not washed, as if they’d had something to eat before they went to bed.
    She called again from the living-room doorway.
    The living room was perfectly tidy. It looked to Peg somehow too perfectly tidy, but that—as she said to Robert—was probably the way the living room of a retired couple was bound to look to a woman used to having children around. Peg had never in her life had quite as much tidiness around her as she might have liked, having gone from a family home where there were six children to her in-laws’ crowded farmhouse, which she crowded further with her own babies. She had told Robert a story about once asking for a beautiful bar of soap for Christmas, pink soap with a raised design of roses on it. She got it, and she used to hide it after every use so that it wouldn’t get cracked and moldy in the cracks, the way soap always did in that house. She was grown up at that time, or thought she was.
    She had stamped the snow off her boots in the utility room. Nevertheless she hesitated to walk across the clean, pale-beige living-room carpet. She called again. She used the Weebles’ first names, which she barely knew. Walter and Nora. They had moved in last April, and since then they had been away on two trips, so she didn’t feel she knew them at all well, but it seemed silly to be calling, “Mr. and Mrs. Weeble. Are you up yet, Mr. and Mrs. Weeble?”
    No answer.
    They had an open staircase going up from the living room, just as Peg and Robert did. Peg walked now across the clean, pale carpet to the foot of the stairs, which were carpeted in the same material. She started to climb. She did not call again.
    She must have known then or she would have called. It would be the normal thing to do, to keep calling the closer you got to where people might be sleeping. To warn them. They might be deeply asleep. Drunk. That wasn’t the custom of the Weebles, so far as anybody knew, but nobody knew them that well. Retired people. Early retirement. He had been an accountant; she had been a teacher. They had lived in Hamilton. They had chosen Gilmore because Walter Weeble used to have an aunt and uncle