"If you'd gotten up earlier," Aggie said. "you wouldn't be late."

Seated in a faded housecoat at the kitchen table, she watched him through the open door. Her graying hair was uncombed after sleep, her face haggard without makeup. A fourth cup of coffee turned cold in front of her, half a a dozen soggy cigarette butts in the saucer.

"Sure, Aggie," he said.

Wincing because his back was stiff, he straightened and dragged a bathtowel out of the water. He looped it over a faucet, wrung it out, and laid it on top of the pile of wet laundry. Finished? He groped around in the gray water, found no stray socks, pulled the plug. He sloshed away the scum line of detergent the rinsing had left halfway up the porcelain sides of the tub.

"You know Monday's washday. You've got an alarm clock. All you had to do was set it. You could have been finished an hour ago."

He dried his hands, a clumsily grown boy of sixteen with soft brown eyes and a mouth that pleaded.

"Not and fixed breakfast for Dad and packed his lunch and then fixed another breakfast for you-"

"God, your life is tough," she said.

He didn't answer. He started past her.

She caught his wrist, her nails cutting into the water-softened skin. "Where you going now?"

"Bathroom."

"Just hang up the clothes," she said. "And cut out the sulking. I'm sick of it." He returned to the little screened porch, lifted down a bushel basket from a nail and folded newspapers into it. Wet clothes loaded in, he picked it up with a grimace and, turning, pushed the screendoor open with his rump. Pivoting, he swung the basket out the doorway, caught the screendoor with his foot to prevent its slamming, and went down the steps to the meager strip of brown backyard grass.

Aggie lit another cigarette and stood up. With raised chin and eyebrows she stood watching his movements among the sagging wire clotheslines, the top of his curly head, arms lifted with the ravelled sweater sleeves pulled back, bright plastic clothespins in his fingers.

"Hang them on the far line, stupid, where they'll get the sun."

Scowling, her frayed mules clacking on the worn linoleum, she left the kitchen.

When he came in he carefully hung up the basket and looked around the porch to be sure he had forgotten nothing. In the kitchen he picked up the cup and saucer. The cigarette butts he emptied into the wastebasket, the coffee he poured down the drain. Under the hot water tap he washed cup, saucer and coffee maker. Crooked cupboard doors shut upon these, he wiped clean Aggie's place at the chipped enamel table, rinsed out the sponge, glanced around to make sure no spot sullied the pasty whiteness of the place, then pulling his old sweater over his head, made for the bathroom. Because he had not expected to find it locked he thudded against the door, bruising his shoulder. "What do you want?" There was a rush of water inside.

"I told you before I had to go to the bathroom."

"Well, I'm sorry, but you'll just have to wait now. I'm bathing.” "But. God damn it-