here was silence on the porch for a moment as the old man and the woman with the pale, unhealthy skin watched the Ford head back up Main Street. It left at a considerably higher speed than that at which it had come.

'Well, we done it,' the old man said contentedly.

'Yes,' she agreed, 'and I feel like a horse's ass. I always feel like a horse's ass when I see the way they look at us. At me.'

'Well,' he said, 'it's only once every seven years. And it has to be done just that way. Because¡­'

'Because it's part of the ritual,' she said glumly.

'Ayuh. It's the ritual.'

As if agreeing it was so, the dog flipped up his tail and farted once more.

The woman booted it and then turned to the old man with her hands clamped on her hips. 'That is the stinkiest mutt in four towns, Henry Eden!'

The dog arose with a grunt and staggered down the porch stairs, pausing only long enough to favor Laura Stanton with a reproachful gaze.

'He can't help it,' Eden said. She sighed, looking up the road after the Ford. 'It's too bad,' she said. 'They seem like such nice people.'

'Nor can we help that,' Henry Eden said, and began to roll another smoke.

So the Grahams ended up eating dinner at a clam-stand after all. They found one in the neighboring town of Woolwich ('Home of the scenic Wonderview Motel,' John pointed out to Elise in a vain effort to raise a smile) and sat at a picnic table under an old, overspreading blue spruce. The clam-stand was in sharp, almost jarring contrast to the buildings on Willow's Main Street. The parking lot was nearly full (most of the cars, like theirs, had out-of-state licence plates), and yelling kids with ice cream on their faces chased after one another while their parents strolled about, slapped blackflies, and waited for their numbers to be announced over the loudspeaker. The stand had a fairly wide menu. In fact, John thought, you could have just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn't too big to fit in a deep-fat fryer.

'I don't know if I can spend two days in that town, let alone two months,' Elise said. 'The bloom is off the rose for this mother's daughter, Johnny.'

'It was a joke, that's all. The kind the natives like to play on the tourists. They just went too far with it. They're probably kicking themselves for that right now.'

'They looked serious,' she said. 'How am I supposed to go back there and face that old man after that?'

'I wouldn't worry about it ¨C judging from his cigarettes, he's reached the stage of life where he's meeting everyone for the first time. Even his oldest friends.'

Elise tried to control the twitching corners of her mouth, then gave up and burst out laughing.

'You're evil!'

'Honest, maybe, but not evil. I won't say he had Alzheimer's, but he did look as if he might need a roadmap to find his way to the bathroom.'

'Where do you suppose everyone else was? The town looked totally deserted.'

'Bean supper at the Grange or a card-party at the Eastern Star, probably,' John said, stretching.

He peeked into her clam basket. 'You didn't eat much, love.'

'Love wasn't very hungry.'

'I tell you it was just a joke' he said, taking her hands. 'Lighten up.'

'You're really, really sure that's all it was?'

'Really-really. I mean, hey ¨C every seven years it rains toads in Willow, Maine? It sounds like an outtake from a Steven Wright monologue.'

She smiled wanly. 'It doesn't rain,' she said, 'it pours.'

'They subscribe to the old fisherman's credo, I guess ¨C if you're going to tell one, tell a whopper. When I was a kid at sleep-away camp, it used to be snipe hunts. This really isn't much different. And when you stop to think about it, it really isn't that surprising.'

'What isn't?'

'That people who make most of their yearly income dealing with summer people should develop a summer-camp mentality.'