Songs Without Words by Ann Packer Page A

returned to the sink, clearly not wanting to say more. Should Sarabeth ask? When Liz was this emphatic she never quite knew.
    “All right,” Liz said, setting the pot of potatoes on the stove with a clank. “We are getting there.” She stood still for a moment, tapping her finger against her chin, then she went to the refrigerator and got out lettuce and a cucumber.
    Sarabeth put the drawing down. She said, “I believe the time has come.”
    “The Wandering?”
    “Exactly that.”
    She had her habits, and one was to spend a little time on each visit drifting through the Mackays’ house and garden—as if she were a nineteenth-century landowner who’d traveled to one of the more distant acreages of his holdings, partly to reacquaint himself with it and partly to determine if there had been any changes since his last visit. As if she were a Levin, come to think of it. She was reading
Anna Karenina
at the Center.
    Through the family room she drifted, past the huge flowered couch, the elaborate entertainment center, the family photos crowding the horizontal surfaces. At the French doors that let onto the patio, she stopped. She could see Liz reflected in the glass, her arm moving quickly as she sliced the cucumber.
    She opened the door and stepped outside. She breathed in the smell of the suburbs. Overhead, the sky was teal blue, starless. She stood still for a moment, then made her way to the wooden glider the kids had given Liz for her birthday one year. She sat down and pushed off with one foot, and the glider creaked as it began to move.
    Who cared about Carl Drake? It was Billy who was on her mind. Endlessly. Or if not on her mind, then in it, readily available: the one channel always broadcasting on her mental TV. She saw him in close-up: his thick hair, always so clean smelling; the scar dividing his left eyebrow, where her fingernail fit perfectly; the shallow rise and fall of his upper lip. No other ex-boyfriend had had such a hold on her, not even Roger Orr, the one guy she’d actually lived with during her spotty romantic career. Was it because Billy had been married?
Was
married?
    The shame she’d felt throughout the affair—she’d hated herself, been unable to stop herself, hated herself; even now it overlay all her memories. Did it also make them more insistent?
    “Hi,” said a voice.
    Sarabeth startled, then looked around.
    “Up here.”
    She looked up and saw Lauren leaning out a window, her shape dark against the bright room. “Hi,” she called up. “Beautiful night, huh?”
    Lauren didn’t respond, and Sarabeth cupped her eyes to try to see better. “How are you?”
    “Fine.”
    “What’s new? I missed you last week.”
    Again Lauren didn’t respond, but she shifted, her silhouette moving to the left. A phone rang somewhere, inside the Mackays’ or close by.
    “Want some company?” Sarabeth said.
    “Sure.”
    “I just have to pee first.”
    Inside, Liz was at the stove, stirring something in a skillet while with one shoulder she pressed the phone to her ear. Sarabeth pointed at the ceiling and kept going. There was a powder room at the foot of the stairs, and she used the toilet, then paused in front of the mirror when she was finished. She had one eyebrow hair that liked to spring away from her brow and call attention to itself, and she wet a fingertip and leaned forward to dab it back into place. She peered into the mirror. She had lines fanning out from her eyes and etched from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, but what really bothered her were the small indentations beginning to appear in her chin. They were curled like little commas, or maybe parentheses: a full battalion of punctuation making inroads into her face. She straightened up, took a deep breath, and looked again. She was a small, elf-faced woman with wrinkles, but wearing an amusing scarf. It could have been worse, she supposed.
    Lauren’s room was right at the top of the stairs. The door was closed, and