“What’s another word for blue?” she asked.

“What shade?” he asked back.

“No, blue as in unhappy.”

“Melancholy.”

“I already thought of that.”

“Sad,” he said.

“I already thought of that, too.”

“I’m trying to write, Beth.”

“But all you can think about is Meredith.”

He looked up. Beth’s unpredictable and direct assaults always caught him off guard.

“I don’t care if you don’t like her,” he said.

“Name one intelligent thing she ever said.”

The Linotype roared into action in the basement. Andy felt the vibrations and heard the rattle of the Royal’s ribbon spool.

“She read Les Misérables in French and wrote a paper on it.”

“And the paper was in French, too?”

“Yes. It was good.”

Beth was quiet for a while. She typed furiously, stopped, then typed furiously again. Andy was always amazed at how fast she could type with hardly any strikeovers.

Beth ripped the paper and carbon from the platen, straight up so it would make lots of noise but not tear. From the corner of his eye he saw her place the original in one tray and the copy in another.

“She’ll be fat someday, like her mother.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’re sickening, Andy. When it comes to her.”

He shrugged, felt the cool spot down in his pants, but didn’t look up. Thought of Carol Thornton’s calves, the alarming bigness with which they disappeared into her skirts. And her arms above the elbows. Meredith looked nothing like that.

Andy found Gunnar downstairs working the Blue Streak, setting the week’s editorial. The room smelled of hot metal and machine oil. Gunnar was a small, pointy-toothed Swede with fingers blackened by decades of typesetting and printing the Tustin Times. Andy thought that Gunnar looked old and somehow permanent sitting before the big machine. He’d seen Gunnar, sitting right here, almost every week since getting a paperboy’s route five years ago. When he had just turned thirteen.