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did pause, noticing things, it was true. And when she turned he was there watching her from the hallway, smiling at her. If he had said anything, it would have been “What are you looking for?” No, it might have been “Looking for something?” because he thought he had caught her prying.
    “I brought you some towels.”
    “Thank you very much. You’re very kind.”
    “I hope you’re comfortable,” she said.
    “I am. Thank you.”
    His voice was soft as it had always been. He never did raise his voice. When they were children he would slip away, leave the game of tag, leave the house, and not be missed because he was so quiet. Then someone would say his name, the first to notice his absence, and the game would dissolve. There was no point calling him. He came back when he came back. But they would look for him, as if the game now were to find him at mischief. Even their father tried, walking street to street, looking behind hedges and fences and up trees. But the mischief was done and he was at home again before they had given up searching. One time, when his absence had ended an evening game of croquet that she was for once on the point of winning, she was overcome with rage and exasperation. And when she knew he was home she had stamped into his room and shouted, “What right do you have to be so strange!”
    He smiled at her, pushed his hair off his brow, said nothing. But she knew she had jarred him, even hurt him. She must have been nine or ten, still the little sister he teased or ignored. Herquestion sounded adult to her, perhaps to him. It sounded un-harmless, and that had startled them both. From then on his wariness included her, too—a slight change, inevitable no doubt.
    And now here she was, embarrassed to have been found putting towels in a long-empty room she had been at some pains to make ready for him, as if a few shirts, a few books, were an inviolable claim on the place and her crossing the threshold an infraction. There was no use being angry. What could he have thought she was looking for? Of course, alcohol. How insulting to think that of her. But then, how insulting to him if she had actually been searching his room. The thought would not have crossed her mind, but he would not know that. Now she found that she almost assumed there was a bottle concealed somewhere, under the bed or behind the stack of Kipling. She promised herself she would never set foot in that room again.
    Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. All those years of work and nothing to show for it. But you make the best of things. People respect that. It is a blessing to know what is being asked of you. And how can this man drift in from nowhere, take a room in the house and a place at the table, and make her feel she was there on sufferance? Though in fact there was no presumption, only deference and reluctance, in his manner. Clearly he, too, did not choose to be there. She found it a little annoying how obvious that was. Of course there was nothing remarkable in the fact of a grown man wanting one room to call his own, especially since he was almost a stranger in the house. Since he was also a member of the family. She went out to the garden. The sun on her shoulders calmed her. The squash were coming up. She would check the rhubarb patch. She stooped to pull a weed or two, and then she got the hoe and began clearing outthe plot she would plant in tomatoes. She had always liked the strong smell of the plants in the sun, the beaky little blossoms. The garden gave her a perfectly good reason not to be anywhere else, not to do anything else. And it always needed more time than she could give it.
    She came into the house and found Jack washing his shirt at the kitchen sink. He glanced up at