“No, Mom. I know exactly what I want. Ben Mears.”

She turned and went up the stairs.

Her mother ran after her and called up shrilly: “You can’t get a room! You haven’t any money!”

“I’ve got a hundred in checking and three hundred in savings,” Susan replied calmly. “And I can get a job down at Spencer’s, I think. Mr Labree has offered several times.”

“All he’ll care about is looking up your dress,” Mrs Norton said, but her voice had gone down an octave. Much of her anger had left her and she felt a little frightened.

“Let him,” Susan said. “I’ll wear bloomers.”

“Honey, don’t be mad.” She came two steps up the stairs. “I only want what’s best for—”

“Spare it, Mom. I’m sorry I slapped you. That was awful of me. I do love you. But I’m moving out. It’s way past time. You must see that.”

“You think it over,” Mrs Norton said, now clearly sorry as well as frightened. “I still don’t think I spoke out of turn. That Ben Mears, I’ve seen showboats like him before. All he’s interested in is—”

“No. No more.”

She turned away.

Her mother came up another step and called after her: “When Floyd left here he was in an awful state. He—”

But the door to Susan’s room closed and cut off her words.

She lay down on her bed—which had been decorated with stuffed toys and a poodle dog with a transistor radio in its belly not so long ago—and lay looking at the wall, trying not to think. There were a number of Sierra Club posters on the wall, but not so long ago she had been surrounded by posters clipped from Rolling Stoneand Creemand Crawdaddy, pictures of her idols—Jim Morrison and John Lennon and Dave van Ronk and Chuck Berry. The ghost of those days seemed to crowd in on her like bad time exposures of the mind.

She could almost see the newsprint, standing out on the cheap pulp stock. going-places young writer and young wife involved in “maybe” motorcycle fatality. The rest in carefully couched innuendoes. Perhaps a picture taken at the scene by a local photographer, too gory for the local paper, just right for Mabel’s kind.

And the worst was that a seed of doubt had been planted. Stupid. Did you think he was in cold storage before he came back here? That he came wrapped in a germ-proof cellophane bag, like a motel drinking glass? Stupid. Yet the seed had been planted. And for that she could feel something more than adolescent pique for her mother—she could feel something black that bordered on hate.

She shut the thoughts—not out but away—and put an arm over her face and drifted into an uncomfortable doze that was broken by the shrill of the telephone downstairs, then more sharply by her mother’s voice calling, “Susan! It’s for you!”

She went downstairs, noticing it was just after five-thirty. The sun was in the west. Mrs Norton was in the kitchen, beginning supper. Her father wasn’t home yet.

“Hello?”

“Susan?” The voice was familiar, but she could not put a name to it immediately.

“Yes, who’s this?”

“Eva Miller, Susan. I’ve got some bad news.”

“Has something happened to Ben?” All the spit seemed to have gone out of her mouth. Her hand came up and touched her throat. Mrs Norton had come to the kitchen door and was watching, a spatula held in one hand.

“Well, there was a fight. Floyd Tibbits showed up here this afternoon—”

“Floyd!”

Mrs Norton winced at her tone.

“—and I said Mr Mears was sleeping. He said all right, just as polite as ever, but he was dressed awful funny. I asked him if he felt all right. He had on an old-fashioned overcoat and a funny hat and he kept his hands in his pockets. I never thought to mention it to Mr Mears when he got up. There’s been so much excitement—”

“What happened?” Susan nearly screamed.

“Well, Floyd beat him up,” Eva said unhappily. “Right out in my parking lot. Sheldon Corson and Ed Craig went out and dragged him off.”

“Ben. Is Ben all right?”

“I guess not.”

“What is it?” She was holding the phone very tightly.

“Floyd got in one last crack and sent Mr Mears back against that little foreign car of his, and he hit his head. Carl Foreman took him over to Cumberland Receiving, and he was unconscious. I don’t know anything else. If you—”

She hung up, ran to the closet, and pulled her coat off the hanger.

“Susan, what is it?”

“That nice boy Floyd Tibbits,” Susan said, hardly aware that she had begun to cry. “He’s put Ben in the hospital.”

She ran out without waiting for a reply.

TWO

She got to the hospital at six-thirty and sat in an uncomfortable plastic contour chair, staring blankly at a copy of Good Housekeeping. And I’m the only one, she thought. How damned awful. She had thought of calling Matt Burke, but the thought of the doctor coming back and finding her gone had stopped her.

The minutes crawled by on the waiting room clock, and at ten minutes of seven, a doctor with a sheaf of papers in one hand stepped through the door and said, “Miss Norton?”

“That’s right. Is Ben all right?”

“That’s not an answerable question at this point.” He saw the dread come into her face and added: “He seems to be, but we’ll want him here for two or three days. He’s got a hairline fracture, multiple bruises, contusions, and one hell of a black eye.”

“Can I see him?”

“No, not tonight. He’s been sedated.”

“For a minute? Please? One minute?”

He sighed. “You can look in on him, if you like. He’ll probably be asleep. I don’t want you to say anything to him unless he speaks to you.”

He took her up to the third floor and then down to a room at the far end of a medicinal-smelling corridor. The man in the other bed was reading a magazine and looked up at them desultorily.

Ben was lying with his eyes closed, a sheet pulled up to his chin. He was so pale and still that for one terrified moment Susan was sure he was dead; that he had just slipped away while she and the doctor had been talking downstairs. Then she marked the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest and felt a relief so great that she swayed a little on her feet. She looked at his face closely, hardly noticing the way it had been marked. Sissy boy, her mother had called him, and Susan could see how she might have gotten that idea. His features were strong but sensitive (she wished there was a better word than “sensitive” that was the word you used to describe the local librarian who wrote stilted Spenserian sonnets to daffodils in his spare time; but it was the only word that fit). Only his hair seemed virile in the traditional sense. Black and heavy, it seemed almost to float above his face. The white bandage on the left side above the temple stood out in sharp, telling contrast.

I love the man, she thought. Get well, Ben. Get well and finish your book so we can go away from the Lot together, if you want me. The Lot has turned bad for both of us.

“I think you’d better leave now,” the doctor said. “Perhaps tomorrow—”

Ben stirred and made a thick sound in his throat. His eyelids opened slowly, closed, opened again. His eyes were dark with sedation, but the knowledge of her presence was in them. He moved his hand over hers. Tears spilled out of her eyes and she smiled and squeezed his hand.

He moved his lips and she bent to hear.

“They’re real killers in this town, aren’t they?”

“Ben, I’m so sorry.”

“I think I knocked out two of his teeth before he decked me,” Ben whispered. “Not bad for a writer fella.”

“Ben—”

“I think that will be enough, Mr Mears,” the doctor said. “Give the airplane glue a chance to set.”

Ben shifted his eyes to the doctor. “Just a minute.”

The doctor rolled his eyes. “That’s what shesaid.”

Ben’s eyelids slipped down again, then came up with difficulty. He said something unintelligible.