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"Call me as soon as you know anything, okay? Promise?"

"You don't need me to promise, Gavin. I'll call 'you. You and Jefferson are the only two people I care about right now."

"I love you, Christie. I loved all of our tender moments at The Meadows," he said softly.

"Me too."

"I'll wait for your phone call," he said. "Bye."

"Bye."

I cradled the phone and returned to the dinner table. They all looked up in anticipation when I arrived.

"I'm not hungry anymore," I announced. "I'll wait upstairs, Uncle Philip. Call me when you're ready."

"Ready for what?" Aunt Bet demanded.

"We're going to the hospital," he said. "Jefferson's on his way."

"You didn't tell me that," she said.

"Didn't I? Oh. Well, it must have just slipped my mind. We had a busy day working on the hotel today," he said quickly and looked down at his food. Aunt Bet scowled at him and then shifted her eyes at me.

"I told you what she did to the twins today. You were going to speak to her about it, Philip. Well?" He looked up at me.

"Now's not the time," he told her.

"It certainly is the time. Why . . ."

"It's not the time!" he declared with more firm-ness in his voice than he had shown since I had returned.

Aunt Bet turned crimson and pressed her lips together. She nodded, her head bobbing as if her neck were a spring on which it rested.

"I'll wait upstairs," I repeated and left them sitting and eating in their morgue-like atmosphere.

A little more than a half-hour later, Uncle Philip knocked on my door. He had changed his clothes and wore the strangest things—a pair of jeans, sneakers, a black sweatshirt and a black and gold jacket that had his name embroidered above the breast pocket.

"Ready?" he asked, smiling. He saw how I was staring. "Oh, this is my high school jacket with my varsity letter," he explained and turned around to show me the Emerson Peabody patch sewn on the back of the jacket. "Still fits pretty good, eh?"

I rose slowly and put on my own light cotton jacket. Something frightened me about his wearing his high school clothes. I didn't know why it should, but it did. He stepped back as I walked out of my room.

"You look very nice," he said. "Very nice."

I wondered if Aunt Bet was coming along with us at least to pretend some interest in Jefferson, but she sat downstairs reading and listening to the twins tinker on the piano. None of them even looked our way as we proceeded to the front door. Uncle Philip opened it for me. I was expecting Julius and the limousine, but Uncle Philip had brought his own, rarely used car up front instead.

"Where's Julius?" I asked.

"It's his night off," Uncle Philip said.

"I'm sure he would have wanted to come."

"Oh, Julius has a girlfriend, a widow he sees over in Hadleyville. He even hints about getting married," Uncle Philip said, smiling. He opened the door for me and I got into the car. Then he moved around quickly to get in the front seat and drive us off.

The night sky was overcast so that even the sliver of moon was hidden. The darkness seemed thicker to me, especially when we left Cutler's Cove and headed toward Virginia Beach. Uncle Philip was oddly silent. I had been expecting him to babble just the way he had on our plane trip back, but all he did was drive and stare out at the road. When I gazed at him, I saw a strange, soft smile form on his lips.

"What a night, what a night," he finally said. I didn't think anything of it, although I wouldn't have called this night very remarkable. The ocean on our right looked inky. I didn't even see one small boat light. It was as if the stormy sky had joined with the sea and one ran into the other. A night sky without any stars or moon was just a vast empty wasteland of bleak darkness to me.

"You were wonderful," he added a few moments later.