Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

a billow of rock music approaching from the south. Teenagers, evidently—a whole carload. Delia heard their hoots and cheers growing steadily louder. It occurred to her that even Roland Park was not absolutely safe at this hour. Also, her housecoat wouldn’t fool a soul. She was running around in her nightclothes, basically. Shetook a sudden right turn onto a smaller, darker street and walked close to a boxwood hedge, whose shadow swallowed hers.
    Sam would be back in bed now, his trousers draped over the rocking chair. And the children didn’t know she was missing. With their jumbled, separate schedules, they might not know for days.
    What kind of a life was she leading, if every single one of last week’s telephone messages could as easily be this week’s?
    She walked faster, hearing the carload of music fade away behind her. She reached Bouton Road, crossed over, and turned left, and one split second later, whomp! she collided with someone. She ran smack against a stretch of tallness and boniness, overlaid by warm flannel. “Oh!” she said, and she recoiled violently, heart pounding, while somehow a dog became involved as well, one of those shaggy hunting-type dogs shouting around her knees.
    “Butch! Down!” the man commanded. “Are you all right?” he asked Delia.
    Delia said, “Adrian?”
    In the half-dark he had no color, but still she recognized his narrow, distinctly cheekboned face. She saw that his mouth was wider and fuller, more sculptured, than she had been imagining, and she wondered how she could have forgotten something so important. “Adrian, it’s me. Delia,” she said. The dog was still barking. She said, “Delia Grinstead? From the supermarket?”
    “Why, Delia,” Adrian’said. “My rescuer!” He laughed, and the dog grew quiet. “What are you doing here?”
    She said, “Oh, just…,” and then she laughed too, glancing down at her housecoat and smoothing it with her palms. “Just couldn’t sleep,” she said.
    She was relieved to find that he was not so well dressed himself. He wore a dark-hued robe of some kind and pale pajamas. On his feet were jogging shoes, laces trailing, no socks. “Do you live nearby?” she asked him.
    “Right here,” he said, and he waved toward a matted screen of barberry bushes. Behind it Delia glimpsed a porch light and a section of white clapboard. “I got up to let Butch here take a pee,” he said. “It’s his new hobby: waking me in the dead of night and claiming he needs to go out.”
    At the sound of his name, Butch sat down on his haunches and grinned up at her. Delia leaned over to give his muzzle a timid pat. Hisbreath warmed and dampened her fingers. “I ran off with your groceries that day,” she said, ostensibly to the dog. “I felt terrible about it.”
    “Groceries?” Adrian asked.
    “Your orzo and your rotini …” She straightened and met his eyes. “I considered hunting up your address and bringing them over.”
    “Oh. Well … orzo? Well, never mind,” he told her. “I’m just grateful you helped me out like that. You must have thought I was kind of weird, right?”
    “No, not at all! I enjoyed it,” she said.
    “You know how sometimes you just want to, say, keep up appearances in front of someone.”
    “Certainly,” she said. “I ought to start a business: Appearances, Incorporated.”
    “Rent-a-Date,” Adrian suggested. “Impostors To Go.”
    “With blondes to pose as second wives, and football stars to take jilted girls to proms—”
    “And beautiful women in black to weep at funerals,” Adrian said.
    “Oh, why don’t they have such things?” Delia asked. “There’s just nothing like that … what? Like that fury, that prideful sort of fury you feel when you’ve been hurt or insulted or taken for granted—”
    Well. She stopped herself. Adrian was watching her with such peculiar intentness, she worried all at once that she had curlers in her hair. She nearly raised a hand to check, till she