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Here was their newest member, born early but in perfect health, thank God, and everything in the Bedloe family was as wonderful as always.
    Well, hold on (Ian told himself). Don’t be too hasty. Daphne was no longer brand-new, after all. She’d had six whole days to catch up before he laid eyes on her. Best to put the subject right out of his mind.
    But over the next few weeks it kept sidling back, somehow.
    If Danny and Lucy had been going together forever, why, a seven-months baby (quote, unquote) would havebeen something to wink at. But they hadn’t been going together forever. Nine months ago they hadn’t even known each other. Lucy had not yet walked into the post office to plunk her famous package on Danny’s counter. She might have been dating someone else entirely.
    In school last year a senior had had to get married to a girl he swore he hardly knew. Or rather, he swore
everybody
knew her. It was Ian’s first intimation of the fix a man could find himself in. Women were the ones who held the reins, it emerged. Women were up close to things. Men stood off at one remove and were forced to accept women’s reading of whatever happened. Probably this was what Ian’s father had been trying to tell him in that talk they’d had a few years ago, but Ian hadn’t fully understood it at the time.
    One night he asked Cicely, “What do you think of Lucy?”
    “Oh, I just love her,” Cicely said.
    “Yes, but—”
    “She’s always so easy to talk to; she always asks me these questions that show she’s been listening. Real questions, I mean. Not those who-cares questions most other grownups ask.”
    “Yes …” Ian said, because he had noticed the same thing himself. Lucy had a grave, focused manner of looking at him. He could imagine she had been reflecting upon him seriously ever since their last meeting.
    “I just think Danny is lucky to have her,” Cicely said, and Ian said, “Well, yes, he is. Yes, he is lucky.”
    Ian had quit his job with Sid ’n’ Ed’s when school reopened; his mother made him. This was his senior year and she wanted him to concentrate on getting into a halfway decent college. The last thing he needed wasto waste his time hauling other people’s mattresses, she said.
    But what she didn’t seem to realize was that a person his age had to have a social life, and a social life took money. By February, he was broke. So when Lucy called and asked if he would baby-sit—a job he hated, and one he was ill equipped for besides, as youngest in his family—he didn’t immediately refuse. “Well,” he said, stalling, “but I don’t even know how to change a diaper.”
    “You wouldn’t have to,” Lucy told him. “I would change her just before I left. And most likely she’d be sleeping; this would be afternoons.”
    “Oh. Afternoons.”
    “Just a couple of hours after school now and then. Please, Ian? I’m about to lose my mind cooped up all day. And I can’t keep imposing on your mother, and Mrs. Myrdal won’t come anymore and Cicely’s got cheerleading practice. I just want to get out on my own a while—go shopping or take a walk with nobody hanging onto me. I’d pay you a dollar an hour.”
    “You would?” he said.
    On the rare occasions Claudia had talked him into sitting, the pay had been fifty cents.
    “And Thomas and Agatha have taken such a shine to you. They’re the ones who suggested you.”
    “Oh, well, in that case,” Ian said. “If it’s a matter of popular demand …”
    So he started walking over from school one or two afternoons a week and staying till dusk. It wasn’t a job that required much work, but somehow he found it far more tiring than Sid ’n’ Ed’s. No wonder Lucy wanted a break! This was the coldest, grayest time of year, and the stark modern furniture that had seemed so elegant in the summer had a bleak feel in the winter. Toys and picture books covered the white vinyl couch. Sheavesof Agatha’s pulpy first-grade papers lay