Melody turns the pages of the photograph album. She has dozens of these; from childhood she's kept what she calls "memory books". She points at a picture. "That's Cy," she says.

The photograph shows her with a man. They're on a weathered cedar deck, at a small table, half-empty plates and wine bottles cluttering it. Behind them, water. In the distance, the San Francisco skyline. The man's mustache is half gray. His face is round. His arms are thick, but not muscular. The table partly conceals a large belly. He smiles, one eyebrow lifted like a tilted apostrophe. Next to him, Melody and her vivid smile. They look happy as newlyweds.

"I had the waiter take our picture," she says, "so I could remember Cy that way, that day."

They've walked to this restaurant from a Victorian house now converted to a small, luxury hotel. It's their last weekend together, but she hasn't told him.

Melody quit her job two weeks ago. She told Cy she was taking a break; she had another job lined up, a much better one, in an advertising agency. He wanted to celebrate, and they spent the last weekend of what he thought was her time off in the hotel. They ate their way around Marin County and took a winery tour.

She knew him enough to see the signs of emotion. She was afraid he intended to propose. She spent the weekend making jokes, setting a fun mood so he wouldn't have a chance to be serious. Keeping him half-drunk was easy; he loved wine.

She'd spent the two weeks visting her favorite places, and the places she'd never taken time to get to. She loved the steep stairs just off Grant street, that led up to Coit Tower, and she loved the Japanese garden in the park. She loved the wild lands at each end of the Golden Gate bridge, and she loved the beach. She saw them all again. She finally saw Alcatraz and the Exploratorium as well. She had dinner with some of the girls from the Lusty Lady, and other dinners with other friends. Last, she went over to Berkeley, to visit Clover. She hadn't seen her sister lately.

Samuel answered the door. "Melody. What a pleasure to see you."

"Is Clover here?"

"And I was hoping you were here to see me. No, I'm afraid she isn't, but you're welcome to wait."

They drank tea in the kitchen.

"I wanted to call," he said, "but we don't have your number."

"It changes a lot."

"Ah... I wanted to discuss my new hobby."

"What's that?"

"Photography."

She hoped the conversation wasn't heading where she feared.

"I was wondering," he said. "I'd like to ask a favor."

"If you're saying -- "

"Would you do some modelling for me?" he interrupted. He raised his tea cup and smiled at her through the vapor that came off the liquid. "I'd pay you."

"Samuel." She used her warning tone. It worked on all but the boldest men.

"Nothing pornographic," he said. "Art. You have a sensational body."

She stood. "I just remembered. I have to be somewhere else."

"Where's that?"

"Anywhere."

He laid a hand on her arm as she passed. "Wait. Let me explain."

She lifted his hand by lifting the cuff of his shirt, so she wouldn't have to touch him. She set his arm gently on the table. "Samuel, I'm not like Clover. I know when a man is making a pass at me. Don't you have any shame? Tyring to fuck your wife's sister?"

"But -- "

"No. I think we're through. Tell Clover I was here. Tell her why I left, if you have the guts."

Cy was always afraid she'd leave him for someone else. She didn't mention Samuel. She wanted not to hurt Cy, though she knew she would, too soon and too much.

Monday she took the film for processing and spent the day at movies, putting off what she knew she should do. She cooked for Cy that night: chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, green beans with bacon, the kind of simple food he liked at home.

Later, getting ready for bed, he stood in the door of the bedroom, in a tee shirt and boxer shorts, complimenting her cooking and flossing his teeth. Nearly every night he talked to her while he flossed. The habit annoyed her, and she'd never managed to break him of it. At least he showered every day. He always smelled good, and he was the only man she'd known who didn't leave liquid on the toilet rim and floor when he urinated. He actually cleaned up after himself.

"Tomorrow's your last day of vacation, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Are you looking forward to the new job?"

"New job? Yes. Can you take tomorrow off?"

He snapped the floss out of his teeth and stood with it wrapped around his index fingers. "Pardon?"

"Can you take tomorrow off? Can you spend it with me?"

"We spent the whole weekend in the hotel."

"Never mind. I shouldn't have asked."

"I have meetings. I can't cancel."

"Never mind. I understand." He opened his mouth to speak again, and she said, "Aren't you ready yet? I'm ready. You know what I mean?"

He dropped the floss in the wastebasket, closed the door, and turned off the light. His modesty always surprised her, even after all the time she'd known him. She'd never been able to persuade him to leave the lights on.

"What are we doing?" he asked. She flipped the sheet off his body. He covered himself back up. "Don't," he said. "I'm getting fat."

"You were fat when I met you, baby. How many times do I have to tell you, if it mattered, I wouldn't be here. I like you like this way."

He rolled over, his back to her. His little wounded act. He liked to be babied.

She slipped behind him and wrapped an arm around his chest. "Come here," she said. He wouldn't. "Don't pout. Come here." She tugged. He rolled toward her. She guided him to a breast. "There. Feel better?" He was already erect. "What do can we do?" she asked. He shrugged and continued to suck. "How should I fuck thee? Let me count the ways," she said. "Missionary. Doggie style. Female superior. Anal. Blow job. Sixty-nine. I could do you with the strap-on. You like that sometimes, don't you, you naughty boy." She pretended to think for a few seconds, then raised his chin and looked him in the face. "I know! Your favorite. Round the world."

"Really?" he asked.

"Unless you want something else."

"Oh, no," he said. "No. That's what I want."

She rolled onto her back. "Well, what are you waiting for, cowboy? Ride 'em."

"No condom?" he asked, probing between her legs.

"It's safe," she said.

"Are you on the pill now?"

"Trust me, it's safe."

He started there, moved to her mouth, and finished in her ass. She said, "Aren't you forgetting something?", and nodded toward the bedside table, where they kept the Astroglide. He'd started pushing his way in without lubrication.

Afterward, she cradled his head against her breasts. He liked to fall asleep that way, but she avoided it. One of her arms would get trapped under him, or she'd find herself crowded against the edge of the mattress, with the downward slope inches away.

"Your breasts are different," he mumbled. "They're harder."

She'd noticed that, but she hadn't expected him to.

"Did you get the add-on boobs?" he murmured. He tended to drop off immediately after sex.

"Silicone? Me? Do I need them?"

"No."

"Are they bigger?"

"No."

"Does that answer your question?"

"But -- "

"Please. I'm tired. You're such an animal, I'm all worn out."

When he started to snore, she sat in the armchair by the window and watched the cars go back and forth across the bridges, processions of headlights passing each other. She wanted to remember what this looked like at night.

In the morning she dropped him at work on her way to pick up the photographs of their weekend. She came home and vacuumed and dusted, and did all the laundry, and the dishes. She scrubbed the tile in the kitchen and the bathroom. She washed the windows. When she ran out of cleaning, she didn't let herself hesitate any longer.

She went to her room and took all her clothes from the closet and the dresser and threw them in a heap on her bed. She pulled her suitcase down from the shelf.

She loved her clothes. They were all she owned, except her CDs, and a boom box, and a few odds and ends. But she was only taking the photograph albums, the suitcase, and her sleeping bag. Fewer things would make a cleaner break.

She saw a bulge in the pocket of a blouse she was tossing on the floor, and reached in, and found the cloisonne locket Terry had given her, the Christmas of their year together. Inside was the poem he'd written about their love affair, in printing so tiny as to be almost invisible. She pressed the locket to her forehead. She'd thought it was lost. She packed the locket and Terry's minor-league baseball jersey in the suitcase.

After an hour of sorting into piles she settled on the little black dress, the Mexican skirt and blouse, and sensible clothes: jeans, shorts, tanks, tees, plain blouses, a khaki skirt, a sundress, white cotton panties and simple bras. Running shoes. No heels. The G-strings and thongs and other sexy stuff she should have given to one of her friends. Too late now.

She'd intended to throw what she wasn't taking in a dumpster somewhere, but it was easier to put everything back in the closet. She set the suitcase and picture albums in the darkest corner, behind the evening dress, to conceal them. If Cy came in the room, there would be no empty clothes hangars, and no visible suitcase, to alert him. He could decide when she'd gone what to do with her things.

She'd cleared out her bank account the week before. She'd paid her way out of the lease on her own apartment. She'd bought an old Volkswagen bug. She was ready to go.

That night they sent out for a pizza and watched a fight on pay-per-view. Cy was a boxing fan. When they went to bed, she gave him round the world again. "You're being awfully nice," he mumbled.

"Don't fall asleep." She poked his ribs. "I want to talk."

He blinked. He was dozing off.

"I'm being nice because you've been nice to me. Do you understand?" she said. "You saved me. I want you to remember, I'll always be grateful."

"I love you," he said.

"I love you, too." What she felt, though, was the habitual affection of familiarity. It was close enough, a kind of love.

He was already asleep, and she was sure he wouldn't remember what she'd said, so she left a note in the morning:

Mel.

She packed the car. It took only two trips, back and forth, to get the suitcase and sleeping bag, and the armload of picture albums. She drove out of her way to Bud's for a chocolate shake. It was the first thing she'd eaten when she came to the City, and there was a nice symmetry in making it the last. She took the Bay Bridge over the water, over the island, and over the water again.

The trip took five days, partly because the old VW was slow, especially on the uphill sections. SUVs barreled up to her rear bumper, misjudging her speed and frightening her. Outside Salt Lake City the car broke down and had to stay in a repair shop overnight. She got a cheap motel and spent her time riding busses and walking and sitting on benches and drinking coffee, much like her early days in San Francisco, except that here were mountains, and everyone had normal hair and no tattoos or piercings. These people bored her. She missed her city by the bay.

The car sputtered on the climb to the Eisenhower Tunnel, but behaved on the long downhill. The sun was setting on the mountains in her rear-view mirror when she reached the bottom. She checked into a motel. In the mountains she'd slept in the bushes, and not minded, but she'd had enough of outdoor sleeping in cities; she never wanted to do it again.

The next day, just beyond Salina, the car acted up again, sputtering at unpredictable intervals and threatening to die. It quit near Lawrence, and she couldn't get it started for nearly half an hour. When it finally caught, it started to backfire. She took the east Lawrence exit. She kept the engine gunned at the stoplights, but when she pulled into her mother's driveway she took her foot off the gas, and the engine died. The car stopped abruptly. She turned off the headlights.

Her mother looked out the door, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "Who's there?" she asked.

Melody stood by the car.

Her mother said nothing, then dropped the towel. "Melody? Is that you?" She raised her arms to the horizontal, as if she would fly. "Oh! It is you! It is!" She ran. "My child. You're home. Oh, my child!" She was laughing. "Melody!" she said, one hand against her girl's cheek, and the other wiping her own streaming eyes.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," she said. "I should have told you instead of, instead of standing her babbling."

"I know, Mom. Clover told me about Daddy."

"Oh, yess, she said she had. Is that why you're here?"

"No. But I want to visit him."

"We'll go tomorrow afternoon. I take flowers twice a week. He's in the cemetery down the street."

"The one where Gabe and I used to play."

"Yes. That one. I go and talk to him. I can't help it, I miss him."

Melody took her mother in her arms and said, "Yes. So do I."

The house reminded her of everything she'd fled. Soon San Francisco was a story someone else had told her. Those years had never happened. The house and grounds and the presence of her mother erased her new self and replaced it with the old one. She was back in her former, smaller skin. She was no longer the sexy woman who could make men do anything she wanted, but the child, and the troublemaker who never knew why she did the things she did: breaking windows by accident; throwing Clover's precious belongings; stealing. Getting carried away, then getting caught. She'd see what she'd done, and wonder why. Too late. The worst thing had always been the disappointment on her mother's face. Melody was the child who failed, unfailingly.

"Why?" her mother would ask.

She could never explain. She gave up saying, "I don't know." Her mother didn't believe her, but Melody wasn't avoiding the question. Her mother couldn't comprehend that she was simply doing things, without thinking ahead.

Mother tried to help. She was a teacher, so she tried to teach her daughter how to behave. How to carry things so she wouldn't drop them. How to do her homework as soon as she got home, so she wouldn't forget. How to lay out her clothes at night, so getting ready in the morning would be simple. And how she should count to ten instead of speaking or acting on impulse.

She followed Melody around. She had her do homework at the kitchen table, where mother could watch, because the girl forgot, or shirked. Mother tried to improve the child's penmanship, and her grammar and composition, and arithmetic.

The youngest child, the one who couldn't learn, was mother's project. The child who failed seventh grade and had to repeat it. That was humiliating, especially when mother took it as her own failure. After that, mother started working on posture and table manners and language, too, and encouraging Melody to choose different friends, and reminding her about chores, and showing her better ways to do them, and pointing out the clothes on the floor of her room. Every minute of the day, it seemed, when she wasn't grading her students' homework or doing lesson plans. There was no end to her meddling.

"Why doesn't she leave me alone?" Melody asked her father.

"She's trying to help," he said. "She's trying to teach you to take care of yourself. She wants you to grow up right. She wants you to have a good life when you're old enough and on your own." She sat in his lap, in the big armchair, with her arms around his neck. She kissed him and pressed her nose against his neck. He was her comfort. She had one parent who loved her.

Melody saw the worried looks on her mother's face. Mother was happy around everyone else, but Melody could only do wrong. She was a disappointment.

She gave up trying because trying was useless. She couldn't be what her mother wanted. She could only be what she was, and she'd show her mother by being more extreme. Eventually the woman had to understand, and give up, and leave her alone. All she wanted was her mother's love. Mother never hugged her the way she did Daddy, or Gabe, or even Clover, in spite of Clover's dislike of being touched.

Melody talked to her mother about this, after a night of lying awake with the memories. All that day she felt like every breath had to be sucked through her dense personal history: this place, her failures, and the admonitions that still echoed in her head.

The two of them were walking home from a movie on campus, waiting to cross Massachusetts Street catty-cornered from the junior high where Melody and her brother and sister had gone to school, where her mother still taught.

"Why didn't you ever hug me?" she asked.

"I tried," her mother said. "Constantly. It was like putting my arms around a board. You stiffened up."

"What?"

"It's true. You melted in your father's arms. You froze in mine."

"It wasn't like that at all!" Melody shouted.

Ada embraced her daughter, and Melody went tense. Ada pressed her cheek against Melody's and held her until she relaxed. The traffic had cleared and they stepped into the crosswalk.

"I thought you didn't love me," Melody said.

"Of course I loved you. Didn't you know how alive you were? Are?"

Melody shook her head.

"You are," she said, "the most beautiful of my children. So intoxicated with everything -- life, people. You had such energy. You laughed so much. One time I looked out the window. It was pouring rain and your clothes were plastered to your skin. You had your face raised and your hands to the sky, and you were dancing. I'd never seen such joy. Do you remember?"

"No."

"You were my magic child. My beautiful girl. Everyone fell in love with you. Everyone. They came to the parties just to watch you. We all loved you. Didn't you know that? Didn't you see that I loved you more than anyone?"

They had stepped onto the curb on the other side of the street. Melody sobbed. Ada held her again, there on Massachusetts, traffic rushing by, college students gawking, while Melody soaked them both with tears. She wept until she couldn't breathe, and her face stung, and the mucus from her nose covered her upper lip, and the fit had passed through her. Ada offered her a tissue and Melody wiped her face and blew her nose.

In the evening they built an unseasonable fire and sat on the sofa.

They sat silently holding hands until the fire began to die down. Ada spoke first. "When are you going to tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"You can't hide it much longer."

"You know?"

"Yes."

"How?"

Ada smiled. "When I was carrying your sister, Nina knew, and I couldn't understand how. When you've had children, you just know. You notice things you wouldn't have noticed before. You understand what they mean. Subtle things. They become obvious."

"I wasn't sure how to tell you. I thought you'd be angry."

"No. There had to be a reason you came home. So I watched. How far along are you?"

"Three and a half months."

Ada thought for a moment. "About two months after your father died."

"Yes."

"Did the one have anything to do with the other?"

"Sort of."

"Have you told the child's father?"

"I don't want him involved."

"Why?"

"He's not father material. He's forty, and he's had four wives, and he doesn't want children."

"I see."

"What can I do?"

"We'll raise it together. If we can't manage alone, Sarah and Nina will help. I want you to make an appointment with an obstetrician tomorrow. You have to start thinking about someone else now. You have to take care of the child."

"I don't have any money to pay the bill."

"I'll take care of it. Your father left me enough." She squeezed Melody's hand. "This will work. There's nothing so rewarding. You'll see. This house needs a child. You need a child. I need a child."

They watched the flames and held hands. When Ada fell asleep, Melody covered her with a blanket and went out on the back steps and looked at the stars and listened to the night. Clover lived in Berkeley and Gabe lived an hour away with Julia. Their father was dead. All she had left was her mother. Starting a family with her mother wasn't what she'd wanted, or expected. But at least her mother had done it already; she'd acquired the skills. Melody had always assumed she would get married and lead an ordinary life. Even when she'd run away and was trying simply to survive, she'd believed this. She'd expected to have a husband, and children, and a house where they all lived together. Now she was back in the place she'd been so desperate to escape that she'd run away and lived on the street, in a city by the ocean, at seventeen. Her only skills were typing, and dancing naked. The office jobs had dried up with the economy, and the dancing was impossible because she would start to show soon. Her mother was her only hope. She should have trusted her. She would trust her now. She should have listened. She would listen now. Her mother would help her. She wasn't alone.