"I'm really sorry, Roy, but that dang Dolly didn't show up, and I'm running way late, and all I got time to do is change the sheets and pillowcases, okay? If it won't bother you."

"It won't bother me. Go ahead."

He sat back in the chair by the desk and glanced over at her as she stripped the bed. She moved in an overly energetic slapdash manner, whipping the used bedding off, yanking up the corners of the mattress to tuck the bottom sheet under.

She stopped suddenly and came over to the desk.

"Hey, I don't remember that lamp."

"I got it at the Meadows Mall, at Sears. I'll leave it here when I go. I needed a better light on these papers."

"You don't really have to leave it. Say, why all those green stripes on those sheets?"

"Standard computer printout paper, Peggy. When you have to read a column all the way across, it makes it easier not to get mixed up."

"What is all that stuff?"

"Sort of an analysis of the securities we hold in three different mutual funds. I'm seeing if we should sell anything or buy anything."

"Looks like big figures."

"We're not really large compared to some of the funds. Right now the total of the three is close to four hundred million."

She cocked her head and said, "You decide what all that money should be invested in?"

"With a little help from my friends."

"I think I should have been calling you Mr. Owen instead of Roy."

"It's not my money, Peggy."

"But isn't it a terrible responsibility for you?"

I'm used to it. I like it. Whether it's a bull market, a bear market or a flat market, you just have to work out your strategy and try to do a little better than the guys over at Fidelity, or Columbia or Vanguard. You have to use every kind of computer analysis you think is worth anything, and beyond that, you fly by the seat of your pants. Right now we're coming to the end of a long-term bull market. My gut feeling is to lock in all the gains on the volatile issues and..." He stopped as he realized from her expression she had but the faintest idea of what he was talking about. He shrugged.

"It's a living."

She laughed and as she started to speak the electricity went off. The window air conditioner ground to a stop. The storm seemed twice as loud as before. He could feel the building shudder as hard rain was whipped against the rear windows.

The dim gray storm light filled the room. She went over and opened the front draperies a few inches and peered out.

"Hey, it's turning into a lake out there." She came back to the bed and finished making it, giving it a final pat.

She said, "I saved you until last, thinking maybe you'd go out."

"In this?"

"Well, it's just in the last hour it's gotten this bad."

As she finished speaking there was a vivid blue-white flash of lightning, so close it made a cracking sound. The thunder followed immediately, a huge bang with any after-echoes lost in the roar of rain.

She sat on the edge of the big shabby wing chair and he could see in the gray light how wide her eyes were.

"And you better not go out in this," he said.

Thanks. That was close! I hope it wasn't the office."

She went over and peered out the window again.

"Looks okay from what I can see. Oh, it hit that big live oak the other side of the highway. Come look!"

Intermittently, through the blowing curtains of rain, he could see big limbs canted down toward the ground, the white of shattered wood where they had been joined. One limb seemed to be across the far lane of the road.

She went over and sat again in the upholstered wing chair, and he turned the straight desk chair to face her. She flinched as more lightning struck, not as close as the previous discharge.

"How long are you going to stay, Roy?"

"I don't really know. Are you going to need the room?"

"I didn't mean that. I was just asking."

"Okay, you were just asking. What I have, I guess, is a kind of dumb reluctance to go back North. When I go back up there, Lindy will be missing out of the life I had up there. I was never with her down here. But the longer I stay down here, the tougher it is on Janie. This is... there's a word for it... oh, a hiatus. I was thinking last night, maybe I could make some kind of long-term arrangement down here. Get a private phone line, and put in a personal computer and a modem and stay in touch with the markets. And maybe go get Janie and bring her down. I wouldn't be getting all the daily gossip and rumor, but maybe that's just as well. I've never needed a lot of people around."

"But you'll have to go back."

"Sooner or later. Sure. But I'm not going to force anything. I just have the feeling there is something I am going to find out about Lindy, by being here. And maybe Janie has to be told what really happened."

She had to speak up to be heard over a louder roar of the rain.

"I wish I could get out of here."

"You don't like it here?"

She made an all-encompassing gesture.

"This is all we got, Fred and me. We can scratch a living, but I don't know for how long. Trying to sell it would be like giving it away. Look at all the spots on the arm of this chair. And the burn. It makes me feel helpless because it keeps on going downhill, with no money ever to catch up. I ought to have the guts to walk away from it. But Fred's the only family I've got left. He loves to putter. This old place will just keep on sliding downhill. All the action is the other side of the Interstate." She scowled.

"Basically, I guess I just don't like this kind of work. And they say that when you don't like what you do, you get cranky and you get lines and you get older faster. I look at myself and I look a lot older than thirty-one."

"No boyfriends?"

"Don't patronize me, Roy. I married a real charmer. And it got annulled, for reasons I won't go into, except to say I wasn't the one at fault. Got the good old maiden name back. Who needs to be Peggy Endelbarger anyway? I met him over at the State University and got married and dropped out in the middle of my junior year."

"I wasn't patronizing you. I was trying to sound friendly."

She smiled.

"So, okay. We're friends. Maybe all I'm trying to do is tell you that there doesn't seem to be any place anybody can go and find the best of all possible worlds. Okay?" She jumped up and went over to the window.