“Just a mo!” Chuck reverted to a bygone period. He ran back toward the open kitchen window and shouted, “Hey, Mom!”
Beth Conner’s voice floated back from above the dishpan. “Yes, Charles? No need to yell so.”
“I’m going to run Lenore down to the school.”
“All right.” Mrs. Conner wiped a copper-bottomed pan and hung it up with her set, one of her many small sources of pride and joy. It was just like Charles, though now a man grown, to let her know where he was going. Teddy had reached an age when he preferred never to say, or else forgot. And Nora had never known a time, never would know one, probably, when she considered her private destinations any affair of her mother.
Chuck carried the Geiger counter to the car, climbed in, and backed down the driveway.
He switched on the headlights and started slowly along Walnut Street. The girl beside him began to turn the knobs on the radiation counter. “Let’s see if you’re radioactive,” she said. She held up the wandlike detector and frowned down at the dials. “Nope. Just overheated.”
“Warm day—for September.”
“Since when wasn’t September warm?”
“How are things?” he asked.
“Just the same.” She shrugged one shoulder somewhere under the coverall. “But absolutely, painfully the same. Possibly a shade worse. Dad seems to be drinking a little too much, a little too often, if you know what I mean. And Mother keeps crowding me a little harder all the time.”