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for license to find out the name you used to run under. Fletcher, they tell me. So I check it through on the teletype. Just routine.”
    She could not look at him or speak.
    “What’s on the books out there is between you and me, honey. All I say is this: stay off my streets at night. Stay out of my joints.”
    In the silence she heard Pop chunk the cleaver deeply into the chopping block. He came out around the end of the long meat counter, saying, “Lieutenant, you know you talk to my daughter.”
    You build carefully, and something behind that clown face can tear it all down. His streets. His joints. Some people from the neighborhood had been in there. It would spread fast. Walter Varaki had been on one knee in an aisle, marking cans and stacking them on a low shelf. Rick Stussen, the fat blond butcher, had been behind the meat counter with Gus, running the slicer.
    She sat in the small third-floor room by the gabled window, and knew it was time to go back down. To wait longer would make it more difficult. The record was finished again. She lifted the arm back and placed it at rest and turned the switch. The turntable stopped. It had been a gift from Gus and Jana at Christmas. Another bus hissed at the corner. It was headed downtown. Down to where the lights were, down to places of quick forgetting. There was a tide that ran strongly, and for a time she had been in an eddy near a lee shore, caught in a purposeless circling. One gentle push and the tide would catch her again and take her on, away from this quietness, away from these people who trusted her merely because one of them had married her.
    She got up from the chair and stretched the stiffness out of her long legs, cramped from sitting so long in one position. She went down the hall to the third-floor bathroom, turned on the light, and examined her face in the mirror. She looked at herself and saw what Rowell had seen. A guilty furtiveness in the gray eyes. The cast of weakness across the mouth, with its sullen swollen lips. The look of the chippy. Chippy in a white cardigan, in black corduroy slacks. She made an ugly face at herself, dug lipstick out of the pocket of the slacks, and painted on a bold mouth, bolder than the mouth she had worn these last months.
    She went down and found Jana swamped at the checkout, five people waiting with loaded baskets. Jana gave her a strained smile and moved gratefully over. They worked together, unloading the baskets onto the counter. Bonny’s fingers were staccato on the register keys, while Jana packed the groceries in bags and cartons. Bonny was curt and unsmiling with the customers.
    Soon there was no one waiting. She straightened the stacks of bills in the register drawer, took the machine total for the day, and, using the register as an adding machine, quickly totaled the checks that had been taken in.
    Gus came over wiping his hands on his apron, saying too cheerfully, “You don’t get upset about him with the funny face.”
    “It’s all right.”
    “Let’s see a smile.”
    “It’s right,” she said, unsmiling. Another customer wheeled a loaded basket up. Gus walked away. Bonny worked the keys so hard that her fingers stung.

 
Chapter Three
     
    PAUL DARMOND finished his pencil draft of his bimonthly report to the Parole Board and tossed the yellow pencil onto the rickety card table. In the morning he’d take it down to his small office in the county courthouse and get one of the girls in Welfare to type it up. At least there’d be no kickbacks on this report. No skips. No incidents. He stood up and stretched and scuffed at his head with his knuckles. He was a tall lean man with a tired young-old face, a slow way of moving. He felt the empty cigarette pack and crumpled it and tossed it into the littered fireplace.
    It was nine o’clock and he felt both tired and restless. He had been so intent on the report that an unconscious warm awareness of Betty had crept into the back of his mind. That awareness