Fran wondered if he was thinking of poor Paul Caron, who had been his friend since before Fran herself was born, and decided not to ask.

At any rate, she didn’t need him to tell her that he had socked away enough in the good years to keep them rolling. What he did tell her was that she had never been a burden to them, in good times or in bad, and he was proud to tell his friends he had sent her through school. What his money and her brains hadn’t been able to take care of, he told them, she had done the old-fashioned way: by bending her back and shucking her buns. Working, and working hard, if you wanted to cut through the country bullshit. Her mother didn’t always understand that. Changes had come for women, whether the women always liked them or not, and it was hard for Carla to get it through her head that Fran wasn’t down there at UNH husband-hunting.

“She sees Amy Lauder getting married,” Peter said, “and she thinks, ‘That should be my Fran. Amy’s pretty, but when you put my Fran beside her, Amy Lauder looks like an old dish with a crack in it.’ Your mother has been using the old yardsticks all her life, and she can’t change now. So if you n her scrape together a bit and make some sparks from time to time, like steel against flint, that’s why. No one is to blame. But you have to remember, Fran, she’s too old to change, but you are getting old enough to understand that.”

From this he rambled back to his job again, telling her about how one of his co-workers had almost lost his thumb in a small press because his mind was down at the pool-hall while his damn thumb was under the stamp. Good thing Lester Crowley had pulled him away in time. But, he added, someday Lester Crowley wouldn’t be there. He sighed, as if remembering he wouldn’t be either, then brightened and began telling her about an idea he’d had for a car antenna concealed in the hood ornament.

His voice switched from topic to topic, mellow and soothing. Their shadows grew longer, moving up the rows before them. She was lulled by it, as she always had been. She had come here to tell something, but since earliest childhood she had often come to tell and stayed to listen. He didn’t bore her. So far as she knew, he didn’t bore anyone, except possibly her mother. He was a storyteller, and a good one.

She became aware that he had stopped talking. He was sitting on a rock at the end of his row, tamping his pipe and looking at her.

“What’s on your mind, Frannie?”

She looked at him dumbly for a moment, not sure how she should proceed. She had come out here to tell him, and now she wasn’t sure if she could. The silence hung between them, growing larger, and at last it was a gulf she couldn’t stand. She jumped.

“I’m pregnant,” she said simply.

He stopped filling his pipe and just looked at her. “Pregnant,” he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Then he said: “Oh, Frannie… is it a joke? Or a game?”

“No, Daddy.”

“You better come over here and sit with me.”

Obediently, she came up the row and sat next to him. There was a rock wall that divided their land from the town common next door. Beyond the rock wall was a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge that had long ago run wild in the most amiable way. Her head was pounding and she felt a little sick to her stomach.

“For sure?” he asked her.

“For sure,” she said, and then—there was no artifice in it, not a trace, she simply couldn’t help it—she began to cry in great, braying sobs. He held her with one arm for what seemed to be a very long time. When her tears began to taper off, she forced herself to ask the question that troubled her the most.

“Daddy, do you still like me?”

“What?” He looked at her, puzzled. “Yes. I still like you fine, Frannie.”

That made her cry again, but this time he let her tend herself while he got his pipe going. Borkum Riff began to ride slowly off on the faint breeze.

“Are you disappointed?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I never had a pregnant daughter before and am not sure just how I should take it. Was it that Jess?”

She nodded.

“You told him?”

She nodded again.

“What did he say?”

“He said he would marry me. Or pay for an abortion.”

“Marriage or abortion,” Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. “He’s a regular two-gun Sam.”

She looked down at her hands, splayed on her jeans. There was dirt in the small creases of the knuckles and dirt under the nails. A lady’s hands proclaim her habits, the mental mother spoke up. A pregnant daughter. I’ll have to resign my membership in the church. A lady’s hands—

Her father said: “I don’t want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn’t he… or you… being careful?”

“I had birth control pills,” she said. “They didn’t work.”

“Then I can’t put any blame, unless it’s on both of you,” he said, looking at her closely. “And I can’t do that, Frannie. I can’t lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won’t talk about blame.”

She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.

“Your mother will have plenty to say about blame,” he said, “and I won’t stop her, but I won’t be with her. Do you understand that?”

She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. There was that acid tongue of hers. When she was opposed, it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen the latter—but on his own terms.

She asked quietly: “Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?”

“You asking me to take your part?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“With Mom?”

“No. With you, Frannie.”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that’s what they say, anyway.”

“I don’t think I can do that. I think I’ve fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in.”

“The baby?” His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden’s hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.

“No, the baby isn’t the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jesse is…” She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jesse, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her, the rush to decide and get out from under the threatening shadow of her mother, who was now at a shopping mall buying gloves for the wedding of Fran’s childhood friend. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother’s favorite sayings.

“He’s weak,” she said. “I can’t explain better than that.”

“You don’t really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?”

“No,” she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn’t trust Jesse, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts. “Jesse means well. He wants to do the right thing; he really does. But… we went to a poetry reading two semesters ago. It was given by a man named Ted Enslin. The place was packed. Everyone was listening very solemnly… very carefully… so as not to miss a word. And me… you know me…”

He put a comfortable arm around her and said, “Frannie got the giggles.”

“Yeah. That’s right. I guess you know me pretty well.”

“I know a little,” he said.

“They—the giggles, I mean—just came out of nowhere. I kept thinking, ‘The scruffy man, the scruffy man, we all came to listen to the scruffy man.’ It had a beat, like a song you might hear on the radio. And I got the giggles. I didn’t mean to. It really didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Enslin’s poetry; it was pretty good, or even with the way he looked. It was the way they were looking at him.”