Her mind was eluding her: it was living the day ahead of her; it was in the aisle of the supermarket, it was bringing the groceries into the house and putting them away; it was driving to the gym for aerobics and weight training; it was home eating lunch, then taking clothes to the dry cleaners and getting the clothes that were there, and driving home before three-forty when the school bus brought the children to the driveway; it was lighting charcoal in the grill on the sundeck. Maybe snow would be falling then; she loved cooking in the snow. She had a housekeeper three days a week and she liked running the household. None of it absorbed her fully enough to imprison her mind, as some work in school and some at the publishing house had. So freedom was both her challenge and her vocation: she was free on most days and nights to concentrate fully on the moment at hand, and this was far more difficult than performing work she had been assigned as a student for sixteen years, and a worker for eleven. She had told Ted she must learn to be five again, before time began to mean what one could produce in its passing; or to be like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who knew so young that the essence of life was in the simplest of tasks, and in kindness to the people in your life.

As she filled the cart, she looked with compassion at women, the harried ones, some with a child or two, the women who did not have housekeepers and someone to care for their children, perhaps did not have husbands or did not have good ones, who were not going to the gym for a long workout to fulfill and relax them, who had to count the dollars they were spending, whose minds had not received the gifts that she had simply been born with, as she had been born with black hair and French blood; women who as teenagers had gone into the world as bodies and faces with personalities, and so acquired boyfriends, then men, then husbands, and children; they were the women whose work was never done because they could not pay someone else to do at least part of it. No wonder one’s voice rose angrily at her small girl riding in the cart, and another grabbed her son’s wrist as he reached for a cereal box, and jerked him away from the shelf. The boy’s face looked immune. It was not as simple as money, LuAnn knew; it was as complex as the soul. But so often the body ruled, and when it was tired, when it was overwhelmed, venom could spread through the soul. And with money, one could soothe the body, give it rest.

Marsha called her husband and told him, and said to come to LuAnn’s after work; then she gave LuAnn her cigarettes and left to get her children at school and buy more steaks. At three-thirty LuAnn went outside and looked at snow on the earth and gathered on wide branches of pines. She said: “Thank You.” Then she looked up at the gray sky. “That I didn’t get killed. That I didn’t get raped. That I didn’t miss his balls. That I didn’t miss with the skillet. That I didn’t beg for their mercy. That I didn’t kill anyone.”

“I’ve never told you this,” she said. “But there’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don’t know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There’s a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It’s significant.”

“Because somebody has to take them in.”

“Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world. With your body. And for those few moments, you join it with your soul. You move out of your isolation and become universal. But they were standing there watching me. Then I was afraid: a woman so far removed from nature that the checkout clerk had to tell me which way the wind was blowing. And she heard it from someone in the coffee room. Then the men left, and I pushed the cart back. I live by trying to be what I’m doing. I could do nearly everything I do without thinking about it. But I’d be different.”

His face was tender in the light of the fire; he said: “Yes.”