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ONE
 
The new County Memorial Hospital was just beyond the eastern edge of the city of Hillton. It had been opened less than a year ago, a four story, U shaped structure of pale tan stone with aluminum trim, curving walks, plantings, a large asphalted parking area. It was in pleasant country of rolling hills, spangled with the bright colors of the ranch types and split levels of the middle income housing developments that had grown up since the war. The hospital itself was a half mile from a long climbing curve of the six lane turnpike that had been opened in 1955.
 
Carl Garrett had told himself, and told Joan—possibly too many times—that it certainly would be a lot more pleasant for her in the new hospital than down in the dingy old red brick structure on Gollmer Street in the middle of the city. At County Memorial she would only be a little over a mile and a half from home.
 
Sunday, the fourteenth day of July, was a most peculiar day for them. Dr. Bernie Madden, family doctor and family friend, had confirmed the presence of ovarian tumors large enough to merit removal back in April, and he had agreed that July would be soon enough, when both Kip and Nancy would be away at summer camp for six weeks.
 
On the first of July they had driven the kids sixty miles into the mountains to Lake Muriel, depositing Kip at Way-na-ko on one side of the lake, and Nancy at Sar-ay-na on the other side, both camps under the same ownership and general management.
 
Kip, at fifteen, was returning to Way-na-ko for his third summer, and was consequently very blasé about the whole thing, yet barely able to conceal his eagerness to meet the choice friends of previous summers. It was Nancy’s first summer away from home. She was thirteen. Kip, as the deadline for departure came closer, had alternated between a patronizing and superior attitude, and filling her with horrendous and disturbing lies about the treatment and facilities at Sar-ay-na. Nancy was both enormously excited and nervously apprehensive about the whole situation. She had packed and repacked an astonishing number of times, vacillating between the bare minimum required, and an inclination to take along every valued possession.
 
A week before they were due to take the kids to camp, Carl had informed the kids of the operation. He had caught them on the fly, so to speak, and told them in the back yard on a hot Sunday afternoon.
 
“While you tykes are up cavorting in the hills, your female parent is going into the hospital for a general overhaul.” Even as he said it, he wondered why it had become so habitual, and even necessary, to use a light touch when talking of serious things with the kids. It was, he supposed, essential not to alarm them, but it did make for communication on a rather grotesque level.
Kip was in blue knitted swim trunks that made him look very rangy and very brown. He had a towel over his shoulder and he was anxious to go jump on his bike and pedal down to the Crescent Ridge Community Pool. He had inherited his mother’s round and rather placid face, and her dark brown hair, which he wore in what was, to Carl, a distressing variation of the crew cut called a flat-top.
 
His impatience to be away evaporated very suddenly. Joan, who had been weeding by the rose bushes, sat back on her heels and looked toward them and said, with a thin note of strain that Carl hoped was too subtle for the kids to catch, “My million mile overhaul.”
 
Kip sat down abruptly on an aluminum and plastic lawn chair and said, his eyes grave and very direct, “Is this anything … bad, Dad?”
 
“No,” he said, rather irritably. And suspected that his own irritation might be an index to his own fears. “It’s just one of those things, Kipper. No cause for flap. She goes in on the weekend of the fourteenth for an operation, and you kids will be completely informed, and we’ll set up a deal where you can be near phones so I can call you and tell you all is well. Which it will be, according to Bernie.”
 
“He took out my appendix very nicely,” Nancy said in a rather defensive manner, and she went directly to her mother. Joan stood up and Nancy hugged her, and held onto her longer than was usual. Nancy, at thirteen, showed much promise of growing into a vivid and striking woman. She had Carl’s dark coloring, his lean face, his long legs. At thirteen her body had begun to blossom at hip and breast—the merest hint of what was to come—and she was perhaps a fractional part of an inch taller than Joan.
 
“You kids run along now and don’t fret,” Joan said when Nancy released her. “I’m not nervous, so there’s no reason for you to be.”
 
They left with an air of reluctance. When they were in sight again, beyond the house, going down the hill, Kip was walking his bike and Nancy was beside him and they were talking intently. Joan stood by Carl’s chair and they watched them disappear behind the Cables’ tall hedge.
 
“A good group of offspring,” Carl said, his tone casual, his voice slightly husky.
 
A week later, after they had left the kids at camp, they drove back to the house, and it seemed very empty. Joan said, “Honey, do you realize this is the first time in … fifteen years they’ve both been away?”
 
“Good practice for a pair of old floofs,” he said. “College coming up before you know it.”
 
“But it’s so awfully quiet,” she said.
 
“Restful, you mean,” he said, grinning at her.
 
The hospital seemed a long way off, but the time went by too quickly. Joan had the house gleaming by the end of the two weeks. They had bought it in 1952, the year after the Ballinger Corporation had transferred Carl from the plant in Camden to the Hillton Metal Products Division. They had spent the first year in Hillton in an ugly and inconvenient rented house in the city. They had purchased the Crescent Ridge home on the basis of the architectural drawings and the promoter’s promises at a time when the cellars were being dug for the first block of fifty homes.
 
It was more house than he had felt they could legitimately afford, but he had never regretted making the decision. It was on a one-acre plot at the highest point on Barrow Lane, the first paved road in the development. It was a ranch type, with three bedrooms and two baths, a double car port, a twenty-six by twenty foot living room, complete, on occupancy, with oil heat, dishwasher, garbage disposal, electric range, washer and dryer.
 
He remembered the excitement of driving out in the evening to see how much more had been done each day. Joan would go out during the day and she somehow managed to get the workmen to make small improvements for her as they went along. When at last it was ready, they drove out on a day in May, following the moving van. Nancy, at eight, was tearful about leaving behind her very dear friends on the block. The lot was raw dirt and the road was being paved, but the new house had a wonderful smell of paint and newness. Joan supervised the placement of the furniture. After the van left they all wandered around, turning on hot water, flushing toilets, clicking the light switches. Carl went into the living room and found Joan sitting on the couch with the hopeless tears running down her face. When he sat beside her and took her in his arms and asked her what the trouble was, she began to sob in earnest. It seemed that she had thought everything would look so wonderful, but now the house made the furniture look horrid. He could see what she meant. The inevitable scars and abrasions inflicted by small children had not been very noticeable in the gloom of the rented house. But in this light and airy home they were all too evident.
 
Nancy came and stood by the couch for a few moments, and then with a wail of heartbreak she flung herself onto Joan’s lap. Kip came and expressed silent contempt at such female goings-on, but his lips were tightly compressed and his eyes were suspiciously shiny.
 
When Joan pulled herself together, she had a hundred ideas about how they could make the furniture look right “without really spending any money hardly.”
 
Carl Garrett, in spite of the fact that his father had been a building contractor, had always been unhandy with tools. But during the five years they had lived at 10 Barrow Lane, he had pleased himself and astonished Joan by turning into a reasonably competent carpenter, a dogged stone mason, a timid electrician and a strikingly inept plumber. During leisure hours he had paneled the cellar, dividing it into play room and workshop. He had put in a fifteen by thirty foot flagstone terrace behind the house, and surrounded it with a low wall. He had installed a whole storage wall in the car port, built a fieldstone barbecue fireplace in the rear yard, built an insulated study in the attic, assembled the components of a high fidelity system, built low bookshelves and coffee tables. The house was comfortable, livable, and quite handsome in barn red with white trim. The plantings had thrived and the lawn was healthy. Most of his projects had been accomplished with a great deal of advice and a certain amount of help from his neighbors on Barrow Lane. In turn he passed along the hard-earned results of his experience.