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make somegreat declaration, but all Carl could talk about was his job, his responsibilities. They felt sorry for her, she thought, but only because they loved her. She was thirty-seven and had never been pretty, never would be. She knew they worried; she couldn’t ask them to stop.
    â€œHe’s a strange one,” her grandmother said when he was gone, “isn’t he?”
    â€œBut nice,” her grandfather said. “Very well mannered. You can see he’s from the right kind of people.”
    She never got to meet them. A few months into their courtship, Thrift Drug shut down the Brushton store and transferred him to Waxahachie, Texas. He wasn’t a letter writer, and on the phone his listening lost its intensity, became just silence, inattention, and after a while she dreaded his calls, the groping for something to talk about other than their mutual absence.
    They decided to take a vacation together—a last chance, a last time or good-bye. A last fling, she didn’t kid herself. Florida in February. Her grandmother didn’t tell her it was a sin, going down there unmarried. It was a time in her life when she thought hard about happiness and what it meant to her, what she would do to get it. Carl made love to her when they came in from the beach, the sand itchy between them. They ate dinner late, walking far out along the pier, taking a table by the rail, the water sweeping in beneath them, slapping the pilings. He found the conch on a long walk far into a bird preserve, brought it to her dripping and brilliant from the shallows. She looked both ways up and down the white line of beach and couldn’t see anybody, then pulled the straps of her top off her shoulders andtogether they gently folded to the sand, knees and feet mixed up. After, they tried to blow the conch like a horn, but neither of them could get even the smallest fart out of it.
    He never said he loved her. He never said it was forever. At least in his silence he was honest, and she was smart enough not to test him. He called her a few times after that, but each time Waxahachie seemed farther and farther away. He wouldn’t say they were over, he was that close-mouthed, that kind of man, and so she had to.
    â€œI guess we are then,” he said.
    â€œLike you didn’t know.”
    â€œWell,” he said, and then didn’t finish.
    â€œWell good-bye,” she said, and that was it.
    Nine years ago, and since then she hadn’t been with another man, as if she were waiting for him to return from somewhere. She knew what people said, knew the children who called her the widow Payne really thought it was true. In a way it was; sometimes she felt as if a death had been involved—besides her parents’, that ancient history of smashed glass and bad luck she refused to look at too closely, not wanting to blame her loneliness on them, no matter how obvious it seemed to everyone else. Sister Marita did not want to be a child again. She was a woman, and had been for more than thirty years. And a strong one, she thought. It took strength to live with disappointment.
    She’d wanted children and she would never have them.
    She’d wanted a husband.
    And still, she made an offering of her days to God. She tried to help others with her listening (yes, that was Carl’sgift to her), and in the choir she raised her voice in praise. She was thankful. She was grateful. But Lord, sometimes she was so tired. Give me strength, she said then. Give me the grace to think of others rather than myself.
    The bus cut through East Hills, rain thumping the roof, and Sister Marita looked out at the dark night, the newsstands and pharmacies closed, their steel shutters rolled down like garage doors. She flexed her hand, nails digging into her palm. Arthritis maybe. Not a heart attack. Her grandfather had lived to eighty-six, her grandmother to ninety-three. She had a ways to go yet.
    At work she punched in before she