Y.K. turns the conversation to Hannah: How many grandchildren do the elder Jarretts have, apart from Katya and Conor?—and what are their ages? Where do the older grandchildren go to college? How many “siblings” does Wes have, and are any of them involved in the family business? And what of Wes, is he involved? Is Wes close to his father?

  Vaguely and evasively Hannah answers. Some of these questions Y.K. has asked her before, when they were lying in bed together, in the hotel. Hannah says that she doesn’t know much about her father-in-law’s business, though she does know that he owns “properties” in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan.

  Between her legs in the most vulnerable, the softest fork of her body, the sudden assault, a caress as hard as a blow, a frantic pulse, frail as a bird’s heartbeat, now weakly beating. The exchange between them, Y.K.’s veiled hostility, has excited Hannah even as it has discomforted her.

  Wanting to be alone with him, the man. Away from this place, the vulgarity of the café, the sticky cracked-vinyl seat on which she is sitting with Katya and the sticky Formica-topped table before them, cheap wine in cheap wineglasses, the rudely staring waitress, the maddening chatter of children like flies buzzing.

  Crazily calculating, even here, in Lone Lake Park, how they might find a way to be alone together, to make love … In one of the lavatories? He might take her into the men’s lavatory and (somehow) barricade the door.

  Swiftly, expediently. No need to remove their clothes.

  But no: The men’s lavatory is filthy. What a thought! Hannah feels a wave of sickness, nausea.

  What is Y.K. asking Hannah?—with an effort she tries to concentrate, no she has no idea, or she has forgotten, she’d meant to check with Wes but forgot, what his life insurance is. And their joint accounts, investments.

  She rarely discusses these matters with Wes, Hannah says.

  “Really! And you say this as if you’re proud of your own ignorance.”

  Ignorance. Hannah laughs, stung.

  Is that her identity to Y.K, a man’s wife, ignorant?

  “Women think that ignorance is a kind of femininity,” Y.K. says, with scorn, “and that may be true. But not the smartest kind.”

  Then, seeing that he has offended Hannah, Y.K. says, “My mother discovered too late, you pay for what you don’t know in any relationship with a legal standing.”

  And: “You could look into the accounts, Hannah—assuming they are joint accounts. And accessible at home.”

  He wants to know how much money Wes has. That is the attraction.

  How much I will have if Wes dies.

  Hannah drains her second glass of wine. Terrible-tasting, irresistible. Pulses beat hotly in her head, she feels a moment’s vertigo.

  Though taking perverse pleasure seeing how the few patrons in the café glance at her and at Y.K., and at the children in the booth, with curiosity. Because they are attractive? Because they appear to be affluent? The tall man in the military-looking hat, the blond woman in the chic suede jacket, pink-luminescent pearls around her neck, scissor-cut hair. Possibly a couple, but are they and the children a family?

  Not possible. This man is not likely to be the blond woman’s husband. Not likely to be the father of these fair-skinned children. Not likely to be anyone’s husband, father, or (even) stepfather.

  A fleeting expression of scorn on Y.K.’s face. His contempt for Hannah, yes, and for her children, unmistakable. She has seen.

  Staring at the small oval face of her watch without seeing the time. Is it late? It is late.

  Is Hannah mildly drunk, or rawly sober?

  As if he has sensed Hannah’s dismay before Hannah herself has fully absorbed it, Y.K. again compliments Hannah on her pearls. Something about the pink-pearlescent pearls around Mrs. Jarrett’s slender neck has engaged Y.K.’s interest.

  He is being gracious, gentlemanly. He is loving to Hannah, effusively attentive. As if he understands that he may have offended her, he may have gone too far. Seizing her hand in a playful manner as if in farewell—but no, he is just going to pay the check at the counter.

  In that instant a wave of weakness sweeps over Hannah. Thinking that Y.K. was going to walk out of this place and abandon her.

  Oblivious to their mother the children chatter excitedly about their gifts. Hannah wonders how she can explain the gifts to Wes.

  Without wishing to be looking in his direction Hannah sees how Y.K. is joking with the slouch-shouldered waitress at the cash register. So quickly, so bizarre an intimacy, between strangers! She is dismayed, she is oddly aroused. He is no one she knows, really: not even his name.

  She sees how between Y.K. and the waitress a slow lewd smile passes, a look of frank sexual complicity, recognition. Y.K. glances back at Hannah smiling his easy smile, with kingly composure assuring her But it’s you I want to fuck, darling. Only you. I promise.

  Hannah looks quickly away, not seeing.

  She is shaken, her face burns as if she has been slapped. She does not look back at Y.K. and the laughing waitress.

  Hurriedly she leaves the café, with the children. He will wonder if she has left him, Hannah thinks.

  It appears to be much later in the afternoon, the November sky has roughened like coarse fabric. Gusts of wind send scuttling leaves underfoot. Hannah stares, those are beetles.

  She might have left. She might have walked away with the children. Driven away in her car without a backward glance but no: She is waiting when Y.K. leaves the café, she will remember this.

  Hannah is quiet, distracted, walking with Y.K. beside her and the children trailing close behind in the direction of the parking lot. The cheap wine has gone to her head, she walks with care in the tight-fitting Ferragamo pumps. She wonders if Y.K. has laughed at those pumps, without her knowing. And if he forgives her, for her foolish vanity. And halfway to Hannah’s car Conor suddenly decides he needs to use a restroom!—how like Conor this is, having just left a place where there was a restroom, and because Mommy didn’t think to ask if either of the children wanted to use a restroom of course they hadn’t given it a thought, and now Conor is insisting in a plaintive voice that he needs to use a bathroom right now, which means that Hannah will have to take him into the derelict concrete lavatory close by, walls covered in ugly Day-Glo graffiti, a stench to make her nauseated, Hannah dreads.

  She has been a sweetly devoted mommy to the children, until now. Certainly she has impressed her lover. But now crying, vexed: “Oh Conor! Why couldn’t you have said something in the restaurant …”

  “Because I didn’t need to go then,” Conor says defiantly, “I need to go now.”

  Y.K. offers to take Conor into the men’s restroom, it isn’t far away. Hannah can take Katya to the car and meet them at the exit.

  Of course: This is only sensible. He will take the boy.

  But Hannah laughs nervously, she will take Conor … as she always does in public places, into the women’s lavatory.

  “But you take the boy into the women’s restroom, Hannah, not the men’s. You said he was seven years old. It’s appropriate for him to use the men’s room, not the women’s.”

  That Y.K. should lecture her, so sternly, in front of the children! Hannah feels a thrill of excitement and dismay. She grips Conor’s hand to hold him fast.

  “No, really,” Hannah protests, laughing, trying to laugh, as if Y.K. is offering her a gift so generous that she cannot possibly accept, “of course I will take him.”

  Conor slips out of Mommy’s grasp and bats at Mommy’s hand.

  “I want to go with him.”

  Taken so by surprise, unprepared for this betrayal, Hannah stares speechless as Y.K. takes Conor’s hand as if the gesture were altogether natural, and familiar: gripping her son’s small pale hand in his large-knuckled hand. Conor melts at once, doesn’t shrink from Y.K. or bat his hand away rudely as he’d done with Hannah.

  Before Hannah can react, Y.K. leads Conor across a grassy stretch to the cement-block restroom a short distance away. Staring after them, Hannah feels a twinge of unease, dread.

  Hannah has been noticing men entering the men’s restroom since she’d arrived at the park. Though there are few visitors to the park there appear to be frequent visitors to the men’s restroom. A burly man in a wool cap pulled low on his head, a spillage of carroty curls at the nape of his neck. A thin acne-faced teenaged boy in an army surplus jacket …

  Weakly Hannah calls after Y.K. and Conor—“Wait …”

  Neither Y.K. nor Conor pays Hannah the slightest heed. The tall broad-shouldered man in the khaki cap, the little boy clutching the model bomber plane. What is the connection between them, confirmed by their grasped hands? Are they talking together?—what on earth are they saying to each other?

  Hannah stares blankly after them, beginning to panic.

  Licks of panic like flames. Suddenly she is terrified.

  Running after Y.K. and Conor, calling to them, begging: “No! Wait! Conor, come back …”

  In an instant desperate, running clumsily in the tight-pinching shoes even as Y.K. and her son disappear into the entrance to the men’s restroom.

  “Come back! Come back! Stop!”

  A middle-aged man with white frizzy hair in a pouf around his face, and his face rubefacient, puffy as if with medication, emerges from the entrance adjusting his trousers and staring at Hannah in astonishment.

  Hannah pushes past the pouf-haired man but hesitates at the threshold to the lavatory, which she has begun to smell. “Conor! Come back! Come here!”—her voice is a wail, scarcely human.

  Y.K. reappears, with Conor, each staring at Hannah in disbelief, she is behaving so strangely. But panic has overcome Hannah, she acts instinctively, blindly plucking at her young son’s hand, seizing the recalcitrant boy in her arms and dragging him forcibly away from the entrance.

  “I—I don’t want him taken into this place … I’m taking him home. Conor, come with Mommy …”

  Hannah has closed her arms around Conor, viselike. The child struggles with her but she overcomes him as Y.K. looks on in surprise and contempt.

  Hannah reaches for Katya’s hand as well, pulls the children with her half running, half stumbling to the parking lot fifty feet away where her car is parked. Both children are crying and appear to be frightened of their distraught mother.

  Cannot look back at her lover whom she has humiliated, insulted. On the walkway Y.K. stands silent and unmoving, too furious to call after her.

  Hannah manages to get the children into the backseat of the Buick. “Stop! Stop! Stop crying!”—screaming at them. Mommy has lost all composure, control. Jamming the key into the ignition, unable to look back at Y.K. Frantic to escape Lone Lake Park and return home.

  In the backseat of the car the children continue to cry as Hannah exits the park. She is roused, veins pulse wildly in her head. Not sure if she should turn left—yes, left—on Hickory Grove Road. Directly behind Hannah in the driver’s seat Conor is kicking the back of the seat shouting that he hates hates hates Mommy.

  Pale-faced Katya is shrieking in terror, too, never has she seen an adult in such a state of raw emotion as Mommy.

  “Stop! Just stop! You are my children—not his. You will do as I say.”

  In fear of her, the children grow quiet. Hannah cannot bear to seek out their stricken faces in the rearview mirror. By the time her panic attack has subsided Hannah is in familiar surroundings—Hickory Grove Road intersecting with Lasher Road entering Bloomfield Hills, twenty minutes from the house on Cradle Rock Road—and she has regained her composure again, or nearly.

  You fool! You have lost him now.

  What have you done!—he will never love you again.

  The Stone

  Yet: next morning the phone rings.

  At a strategic time: when Wes is certain not to be home, and the children are certain to be in school.

  In dread that Ismelda will answer the phone downstairs and take a message for her Hannah hurries to pick up the receiver.

  “Yes? Hello?”—her voice is feathery-light, hesitant.

  And for a moment he is silent. She hears the measured breathing, she knows that it is him.

  Seeing again the expression of incredulity on the man’s face, and fury as quick as leaping flames.

  His contempt as she’d pulled Conor away from him at the entrance to the malodorous men’s room.

  Through the interminable night reliving the scene. Unable to sleep for a single sleeping pill wasn’t enough and she feared taking a second so soon after the first as Wes slept beside her on the other side of the bed oblivious of her misery.

  Trying to calm herself. Trying to reason—What was the harm? There could have been no harm, he would never have hurt Conor.

  “Hannah?”—the voice, deep-chested, not angry as she’d expected but tentative, questioning.

  Hannah replies, faint, weak: “Yes …”

  Relieved that her lover isn’t angry with her. Doesn’t appear to be angry with her. She has tried to comprehend her panic but cannot.

  No harm could possibly have come to Conor. Y.K. was only taking him into the lavatory, Hannah was waiting outside in full view of the entrance …

  Had Hannah thought that Y.K. might be Babysitter? Is that why she’d panicked?

  Y.K. is speaking to Hannah in a genial, measured voice. He is certainly not angry with her though he acknowledges that he has been “shaken”—“baffled”—by her behavior the day before. Her (evident) distrust of him, in front of the children, the children she’d so badly wanted him to meet, he doesn’t understand.

  “We need to talk, Hannah. Today.”

  Not Babysitter. This man is not Babysitter. What is wrong with you!

  Hannah is trembling badly. Had the thought actually come to her, if but for a split second, that Y.K. was Babysitter? How was that possible!

  “Our future depends on straightening up this terrible misunderstanding—this insult. Our love for each other …”

  Hannah thinks: It is Bernard Rusch who might have been Babysitter. Not her lover.

  Too much for Hannah to absorb. Her life has been a narrow creek bed, now suddenly rushing with water, overflowing its banks.

  Recalling when her life had been so peaceful a life, so orderly and predictable a life. She’d confused the calendar on her desk for the flow of life itself: each day a rectangle on white space, emptiness waiting to be filled.

  A matter of appointments: day following day in a calm progression.

  She had been in control. Filling in the blanks in the smug warm hive of suburban life.

  And family life: hive within a hive keeping wife, mother safe, nourished.

  She has lost that now, Hannah thinks. That calm, and that control.

  Her lover has entered the calendar life, he has demolished the dull order of her hive days. He is threatening to destroy her family, she must escape him.

  Even so, badly frightened, Hannah has been conditioned to be courteous, polite.

  “Today?—I wish I could but I can’t … I have two appointments this afternoon.”

  How guilty the placating voice. And how strange this is: Where once Hannah would have been weak with excitement at the prospect of meeting her lover in their private place, now she dreads seeing the man again.

  He will be angry with her, she thinks. Once they are alone together.

  He will punish her. He will hurt her, badly. A memory of her bruised neck, shoulders in the mirror …

  But Y.K. is saying that he misses her. He’d had a “bad night.” What happened in the park is “baffling” to him. He can only think, he says, that Hannah was upset about something before they’d met, that had nothing to do with him.

  “What you’d been reading in the newspaper, I think. That was it. People that you know, neighbors of yours, that have nothing to do with me.” A pause. “And that second drink—I shouldn’t have ordered it for you, it had a noticeable effect upon you.”

  Y.K. is being enormously reasonable, generous. Offering to blame himself, for Hannah’s rude behavior.

  He pauses to give Hannah time to respond. Reluctantly Hannah murmurs Yes.

  Thinking—Must never see him again. Never let the children near him.

  Of course, Hannah doesn’t believe that Y.K. would harm her children. She doesn’t (seriously) believe that Y.K. is Babysitter.

  Yet, there exists the possibility that Y.K. is Babysitter. As quicksilver as the flicking of a card on a table the possibility that Y.K. is Babysitter. Seeing how Y.K. gripped Conor’s hand and tugged him along the walkway in the direction of the filthy lavatory: the inclination of Y.K.’s head, the trusting upward tilt of the child’s head, the two (adult male, male child) close as conspirators, exchanging words which the mother of the child can’t quite hear.

  The mother, excluded, unable even to guess what Y.K. and Conor might say to each other. In that moment forced to realize how perilous it is, her possession of her children: how easily they might be taken from her, and how (possibly) willingly they might wish to be taken from her.

  It has not occurred to her until now, the children taken by Babysitter might have been enticed by him, to go with him. Maybe force wasn’t needed.

  “Hannah, dear?—are you still there?”

  “Yes—of course. I—I’m—I’m here.”

  “Where, exactly is that?”

  “In the kitchen. But I’m not really alone, Ismelda is—is nearby …”

  In fact Hannah is still upstairs in her bedroom. Eleven-fifteen and she isn’t yet dressed, hasn’t yet showered. Lying awake through most of the night has left her both lethargic and anxious. She has been awaiting this call from Y.K. for hours—or, no call from Y.K.

  In the park she’d insulted him irrevocably. Clearly he would never forgive her. He is not the kind of man to forgive, she is sure.

  Not knowing if she would be devastated, if he failed to call her. Or profoundly relieved.

  Y.K. is sounding uncertain, even just perceptibly plaintive, like a man stumbling along a path he’d believed to be familiar, that has turned out to be surprising him: “You haven’t been sounding like yourself, Hannah. Something must be wrong.”