MARGARET HAD BEEN working nine months at the New Life Food Cooperative when her husband came back to town. She hadn't been expect ing him; she had been trying not to expect anything from anyone. Sim plicity was her desire now: to care for her two children, to get enough sleep, to pay the rent. Her present life was such a surprise to her, so unimagined, that in her abashment she felt ignorant, remote from her own future. Many dozens of faces came up the stairs to the store each day, and it was her job to stay still and let their needs flow through her mind and into her fingertips; when she went to pick up her children each afternoon, joining these streams of people, she tried to keep herself compact, her own needs minimal. She felt peaceful on nights when she was able to go to bed at the same time as her children, especially when she might wake up at midnight and under stand that she had already slept for three or four hours and that a full passage of rest remained. As she went back to sleep, the undemanding night would seem to be caring for her, perceptibly, but beyond her knowledge. The afternoon that Sloan came up the stairs of the co-op, reports had been blowing in with customers of a bitter shift in the weather, a tempera ture drop of at least twenty degrees and a stupefying icy wind. Margaret had been listening to Mimi and John joking as they stacked away produce in the walk-in cooler about the coming of another ice age, not two thousand years hence, but now, brothers and sisters. Mimi, dressed in her usual plaid flannel shirt, her long hair braided, had been throwing twenty-five pound bags of organic carrots through the doorway to the lanky, down-vested figure of John, astride crates of lettuce and broccoli in the cooler's interior, and in their exuberance they seemed to Margaret exempt from catastrophe. She herself was at least ten years older than either of them, she had children, her father was dead, her education incomplete, her marriage a bewildering disappointment, yet she listened to them companionably. Never, before this job at the New Life, had she felt so comfortable and accepted. She liked the large upper room with its bins of grains and seeds, its shelves of herbs and spices and coolers of dairy products and fresh produce, she liked the section of useful, invigorating books, and she liked the people, Mimi and John, and Carl. Yes, it's coming, said John. This here cooler is nothing compared to what's coming. Do you know what's really going to happen? laughed Mimi. We're all going to learn to lower our body temperatures and live forever. Naw, we'll just change into something else, called John. Margaret rang up a customer and went back to stocking the herb jars. She heard Sloan's drawl before she saw him. 40