"I mean Lily can't say simple things like 'thank you' or 'I'd rather not' or 'please may I have more coffee,'" Martha added, turning then to Lily. "I don't know what's wrong with you but you can't."

"Nothing's wrong with her," Everett said, although he saw Martha's point. he had only a week before learned that Lily was allergic to strawberries, which he had seen her eating with apparent delight innumerable times. "I thought your father liked them," she said, in explanation.

"Everett, it's true. I'm not being mean to Lily, I'm only observing something interesting. Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands."

Martha poured the rest of a bottle of wine into Lily's glass and sat back, watching Lily. "First Lily says thank you. Then she wonders: did he hear her? If he didn't, was he thinking how rude she was? Assuming that he heard her, was just 'thank you' enough? If not, what more? On the other hand maybe 'thank you' was too much. Maybe she should have just smiled. Maybe he thought she'd been forward. In fact maybe she'd been mistaken in thinking he was holding the door for her at all. Possibly he'd been holding it for someone behind her, his wife, or an old lady. If that was the case, thanking him made her look like a perfect fool, and now she can't remember why she came to the hardware store in the first place, and every now and then all day she thinks about how she might have handled it. I mean the crises Lily faces from day to day."

Lily had blown out the candles on the table and transparently misunderstood Martha: "I don't think good manners are ever amiss," she said. But later, when she was brushing her hair and he was working at the card table he had covered with tax records, he looked up and saw that she was crying, crying and brushing her hair as if she wanted to brush it out. He had put aside the depreciation schedule and picked her up in his arms, the hairbrush still in her hand. Her voice muffled against his shoulder, she explained that she wanted to be like other people, wanted to be able to talk to people. "You're shy," he said. "There's nothing wrong with being shy." There was, Lily sobbed, something wrong with being shy when you were going on twenty-four years old, and anyway she was not shy, she was simply no good around people and that was that. He had lain on the bed with her and the hairbrush and told her that she was not to talk that way, that she was not other people. She was, he added, turning out the light, his baby. It occurred to Everett later that he had in that commonplace endearment put his finger on some of Lily's virtues and certain of her failings.