“You can’t be serious,” he said incredulously. “Why isn’t the road in front of this house the city limit? There’s only cotton fields on the other side of it! I feel like a planter every time I go out the front door!”

“I don’t know,” Catherine said. She was looking around the kitchen, which her father had used for the shelving of medicines and supplies of plastic gloves and tongue depressors. The little stool Leona had used to get supplies from the top shelf was still sitting by the door. “The line runs right through my backyard.”

Tom shook his head darkly at this piece of town planning, and Catherine wandered back out into the living room. The office-the house, she corrected herself-was as familiar to her as her own home, and it felt strange being a guest in it.

She sat down in the caved-in chair and leaned forward to see what magazines Tom bought. A photography glossy, Playboy, Time. The phone placed so neatly by the stack was a princess type. On the smooth back of the receiver Tom had pasted a list of phone numbers. It was not an extensive list. Tom was not integrated into the town’s life yet, since he had been gone on weekends for the past months. Catherine noted that her own number topped the list. He really doesn’t know any girls, she thought wryly.

But Tom was attractive in a long dark way, and Leila, the Gazette secretary-receptionist, had been giving him the eye ever since he started work. With the fiancée out of the picture, maybe Tom would wake up to Leila’s adoring brown eyes.

“How did your dad stand having his office and house so close?” he asked as he handed Catherine her can of beer.

“The house I live in now was my grandparents’,” she explained. “When my dad finished medical school and moved back in with them, they were already getting old. They had him late, and he was an only child. So he wanted to be close to them in case of an emergency, and my mother didn’t mind living with them. This house was up for sale. So it was convenient to him.” She sighed. “Things were different then. People would come at night-” and Catherine stopped dead.