Random Winds by Belva Plain

the household, for somebody had to try to manage things. But you were always the heart. You were the heart.
    In the pile of letters that arrived during the next week, there came a note from Jessie Meig.
    “Father and I were so sorry to learn of your father’s death. He was a kind, old-fashioned man. He will be missed. If you ever have time, would you come to visit us? Would the Sunday after next for tea at four be all right?”
    He whipped the letter against the table’s edge. Be damned if he would walk into that house again! What did they think of him, for God’s sake? Why should he want to visit there? A small fury surged in his chest, and then receded. Very likely they weren’t thinking anything. Then he felt foolish.
    He looked at the letter again, at the blunt black strokes: an unusual script, individual and strong, rather like Jessie herself. He wondered what life was like for her now in that house with her sister gone. Not that they had been that warm toward one another! Still, a sister was a sister. He was tempted to accept. Admittedly, and not unnaturally,he was a little curious. Why not? But on second thought, he decided he really didn’t want to go.
    A few weeks later his mother reported, “Jessie Meig telephoned today. She wondered whether you had got her note.”
    He was ashamed of his rudeness. Perhaps he had been more than rude? Perhaps even terribly unkind, rejecting the well-meaning, outstretched hand? Then he had a mental picture of Jessie, seated in the enormous wing-chair, almost curled within it, as though she felt protected by the wings. He had forgotten how small she was, and he thought: Out of pure decency, I ought to go.
    So, on the following Sunday afternoon he strode up the walk between the iron deer, stood under thawing icicles on the porch and entered the house he had never expected to enter again.

Chapter 7
    Jessie put the remainder of the lunch into a bag and capped the Thermos. “Do you want to drive, Martin, or shall I?”
    “It’s your car. You drive.”
    Summer had barely peaked and already the first small signs of its wane were beginning to appear. Blueberries, powdered with pale dust, were thick along the roadside. Queen Anne’s lace stood stiff and starched in the fields.
    Ever since winter’s end, Jessie had been going along with Martin on his far country house calls. He wasn’t quite sure how the habit had been formed; he thought vaguely that it might have been her father who had suggested it At any rate, that negative, inhibiting person had been surprisingly cordial during these past months.
    “It’ll do you good to get out more,” he had said.
    Certainly that was true. Jessie’s need for companionship was visible enough. Martin understood, because the same need was in him. He missed good talk, that quick comprehension which comes when the associations and the bent of mind are kin. Most of his boyhood friends had dispersed; those still here at home were married and there was no place for Martin in their households. After five close years, he felt the loss of men like Tom and Perry. It seemed sometimes that in all of Cyprus the one person to whom he could really talk was Jessie Meig.
    The father went upstairs in the evening now, leaving the library to them. Martin had come to take his place opposite Jessie at the chessboard. She usually beat him! There was music on the radio; there was pleasant comfort.
    “You’re worried about something again,” she said, taking the wheel. “I can always tell.”
    “I am. It’s that place we stopped at before lunch. I’m still feeling sort of sick about it.”
    “The woman with the cough?”
    “Cough and nausea. She’s lost sixteen pounds in the last two months. I know it’s a malignancy. I’m so sure I’d take a bet on it.” He shook his head in recollection of the dreary young woman with the delicate face. “I told them she needs to go to the hospital for tests. I was as emphatic as I could be without using the word