"I'll tell her the first part," Lydia said. "The second part you can say yourself, when you mean it in the room."
Helen accepted that. She put the magazine page, still in her bag, under her hand for a moment through the leather, as if she could feel the hearing-aid advertisement and the three names. Then she left, upright, already composing the sentence she would owe Paul in the car.
Lydia remained with Penrose only long enough to write down Ruth's number, which she already knew, and to hear him say that the porch light had been Mrs. Adelman's job in June and was Ruth's again now. She thanked him. In the elevator she read the first line of the letter and had to stop and hold the rail. A man with a briefcase asked if she was going to the lobby. She said yes. She managed it. The tin-colored sky outside had not changed, but the day had a different job now. She drove toward Orchard Street with the letter on the passenger seat and the radio off, and she did not practice the speech. Her mother had asked for plain. Plain would have to do.
Orchard Street in September had the tired generosity of a block that had already done its blooming. The maples were thinking about color and had not committed. Ruth's car, a gray sedan with a crack in the passenger visor, sat in the drive beside the space where Evelyn's car had been sold in July. The porch light was off because it was still day. The rail by the steps shone a little, recently wiped. Lydia parked at the curb and sat with her hands on the wheel until a neighbor's dog finished its opinion of her arrival. Then she took the letter and went up the walk she could have walked in her sleep, avoiding the place where the concrete had heaved.