On his third day on the job, Mr. Haddon, the painter, had worked his way to the section of the house outside the upstairs room where Bea did her writing. By then she had become (somewhat) inured to his interruptions--"Would you like to see how rotten this gutter is, Missus?"; "I gotta go get some Raid--these bees is terrible"--and she was even able to screen out most of the continuous dialogue that took place between Mr. Haddon and John, his gangly, lumbering assistant.

"Dialogue, indeed!" Bea sniffed to herself, as she thought of Mr. Haddon's endless chain of observations and the monosyllabic responses that John produced from time to time when he recognized the need to forestall another of Mr. Haddon's rephrasings.

She was already at work when they arrived that morning. The day was unusually warm for March, and she had opened her windows right after breakfast, delighting in the soft warm air, in the sunlight on the maple tree at the edge of the backyard, in the smell of early spring. She had felt a surge of creative energy as she sat down at her desk; she was approaching a crucial part of her story--the accident that was to shed light on the enigmatic relationship between Melissa and her mother--an episode with which she had been struggling for days.

Her realization of what was about to happen in her own world was (virtually) subliminal as she concentrated on the details in her story--the rainy night and the dangerous intersection. The snatches of conversation outside her window were just at the edge of her consciousness.

"Bring both them boxes, John--no, both big boxes--in the back of the truck. Eh?"; "Did you get that drop cloth?"; "Where's the small ladder? The other ladder, the steel one. Eh?" And then, to Bea's horror, the ends of a ladder thudded against the windowsill.

"Good morning, Missus." Bea looked up. Mr. Haddon's head and shoulders appeared at the window--his navy "Cat" cap sat squarely on his round head, and a benign, almost toothless smile brightened his red face. "Lovely morning." She realized that he was less than five feet from her elbow, and she stifled a sudden urge of demonic laughter at the absurdity of their position. But she also realized the gravity of her situation.

"Good morning, Mr. Haddon. Yes, it is." She tried to affect the right blend of politeness and distance, at the same time experiencing a wave of desperation that bordered on illness, as she realized how badly she had done. "I'm trapped," she thought. "I can't just get up and walk away." She turned back to her computer with exaggerated deliberation, hunching her shoulders and running her fingers through the hair on the top of her head. Her mind, she realized, had gone blank. "Stop this," she said to herself, and she tried to remember the words she had planned to use to describe Melissa's distraught state of mind as she fled from that painful confrontation with her lover.

"We never used to get days like this so early in the year." It seemed as though Mr. Haddon's voice was right at her side. "Matter of fact, I remember once, oh, thirty, mebbe forty years ago, in Center City, there was ice on the river right into April. I remember 'cause one of the neighbor's kids fell through on Easter Day. Can you imagine? Ice on Easter Day. Don't have winters like that much anymore."

"No, I guess we don't." I can't just get up, she thought; I'll pretend to work for a few more minutes and then make up an excuse to leave. I'll say, "Well, I guess it's time for a cup of coffee, Mr. Haddon," and I'll smile and go. Can I take my stuff with me? My notes? My pad and thesaurus? And my laptop, which I'm going to need in a minute?

"Course, that kid was always in trouble. One of ten, he was--they was ten kids in the family, seven boys, no, eight boys and two girls, they was. All redheads 'cept him--Irish, ya know--yeah, all redheads. He was a caution that one, Tommy, he was. Don't remember many of their names but I'll never forget Tommy. His ma useta say, The Lord sent Tommy to keep me from gettin' stuck up, she'd say, but, ya know, she really loved him. But oh, them sisters was pretty--real beauties--Mary and, let me think, Sheila, I think it was--they called her Ceil, somethin' like that. And didn't the fellas hang around 'em. But their father--he was terrible strict and, when he was drunk, he raised holy Ned--you could hear him all the way down the street."

"Is that right?" Bea said, realizing immediately that it was the worst response she could have made--not obvious enough to stop him and not cordial enough to engender the warmth that would prevent hurt when she eventually made her getaway.

For a moment there was silence, and Bea fought her way back to Melissa's physical sensations as she sped through the rain. "The back of her neck ached, and she realized that her nails were digging into her fingers as she clutched the wheel," she wrote; what else would she feel? What else would she notice? Bea was writing, "Lights slanting through the wet branches reflected on the pavement," when she realized that, almost beside her, Mr. Haddon was chuckling.

"I remember one night when he come home, drunk as a lord; you could hear him singin' all the way from the bar at the corner--some old Irish song he useta sing--'McNamara's Band' I think it was. Tommy, he'd left a scooter out on the walk--you remember them things?--he'd made it hisself out of some old boards and wheels he'd found in the dump, and he'd painted it bright red--he was some proud of that scooter--useta ride it down the street hell-bent--his ma would scream at him that he was gonna kill hisself or someone else--anyways, left the darn thing right in front of the stoop. Well, his pa come roarin' down the street like a big ole tuba or somethin', lettin' out this terrible song, and, boys, if he didn't step on that scooter and crash right into them front steps with a crash you could hear in Manhattan. John, you got any more number three sandpaper? Get some outta the truck. No, there in the crate behind the seat."

At this point, Bea began to shiver. "This is ridiculous," she told herself. "Get up and go into the kitchen."

"Just a minute, John. I'll give you a hand," Mr. Haddon was yelling cheerfully.

Bea knew she should leave her desk; and yet she wanted to get down the details of Melissa's thinking. They were the details that would enable Melissa to produce a scenario that might head off her mother's bitter comments.

"One part of her was aware of her own existence," Bea wrote, "but she couldn't avoid the image of her mother, listening and judging." Melissa's state of mind was tantalizing; the words that described it were almost within Bea's grasp.

"Poor Mary," Mr. Haddon went on. "Terrible things like that shouldn't happen to a lovely girl like Mary. Okay, Missus. John and I are going to take our break now. Say, have you seen them bees? Aren't they somethin'? Seems like every year we get more of 'em. Makes it tough."

When Bea got up from her desk, Mr. Haddon was nowhere in sight. She started to walk from the room, when suddenly she stopped in her tracks. She sat down again and went back to her story. "Poor Melissa," she wrote. "Terrible things shouldn't happen to a lovely girl like Melissa."