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Mary had arranged to meet her cousin on the lower level of the bridge plaza. It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and the car exhausts were aggravating her sinuses. She hadn't counted on the unmerciful heat or the asphyxiating fumes, but she knew well enough what the smell of freshly cut grass would do to her hay fever. Still, in another month there would be leaf mold to contend with. And today was, after all, the anniversary of her husband's death. Kitty's bus was on time, not surprisingly since it had only to cross the bridge from its terminal on the New York side of the bridge. Kitty never ventured out of the Bronx except to meet Mary for a Broadway show or, when Mary's husband was alive, to take a ride upstate for dinner at a German restaurant he was fond of. Once when Mary arranged to meet her at the midtown Port Authority Bus Terminal, they got their signals crossed. It was an hour before Mary found her standing under the clock outside a bank on 42nd Street.

"For the love of God, Kitty, I've been looking high and low for you."

Kitty had been dressed in a powder-blue suit with a white rabbit hat on her head. She stood clutching a huge white leather bag, on the lookout for muggers.

"Mary," she whispered as her cousin ushered her to safer territory, "you'll never guess what happened. I wasn't standing there ten minutes, minding my own business, when this big black woman comes along, looks me up and down, and says, 'This here your corner, honey?'"

Today she arrived in a pale green shirtwaist which didn't really suit her pink skin and platinum hair. They kissed each other's cheeks as the bus roared off, blowing gray smoke in their faces. Mary covered her nose with a handkerchief she kept in her sleeve for that purpose.

"Come away in here," Kitty said, indicating the shelter.

Mary glanced uneasily toward the underpass out of which Kitty's bus had come. The Eighty-Two which would take them to the cemetery was nowhere in sight. "Do you think we can spot it from in there?"

"Sure, why not?" Kitty replied, patting the wooden bench beside her as if it were not she but Mary who had just arrived. "Take a load off your feet."

Mary sat down with a sigh, nestling her black bag on her lap. Kitty smiled contentedly. She had one of those faces that always seemed to be smiling, if only with their eyes. "I'll keep an eye out for it," she said, laying her hand on her cousin's knee, covered to an excess of one inch by her black crepe dress. The blue stone on Kitty's finger exactly matched the color of her eyes.

"I didn't know what to put on," Mary said. "It doesn't seem right to be still wearing black."

"Why not?" Kitty protested, a merry flicker in her eyes which also kept her lips in constant motion, as if those two parts of her anatomy shared some delightful secret between them.

"I've got a closet full of dresses. I must have tried on half a dozen."

"You look very well in black."

Mary fingered the coarse material. "It wears like iron."

"Here's a bus now."

The two women stood up together as the bus roared out of the underpass. "Can you make out which it is?"

"I can't, no."

Gaining momentum, the bus sped past, leaving a blue fog in its wake. "He never even slowed down, Mary."

"It couldn't be ours. This is the first stop for the Eighty-Two on the Jersey side. That one must be heading out to Hackensack or Paterson."

"Do you think so?"

Mary looked around the deserted shelter. "I wish there was someone we could ask."

"There'll be another, won't there?"

"Oh, sure," Mary said without conviction. She adjusted the netted scarf she was wearing to protect her hair from the wind, and pulled it tight beneath her chin. Her own eyes, more gray than blue, were enlarged by glasses she had worn ever since her adolescence and which now seemed as much a part of her face as her nose or mouth. They were plastic-rimmed, a pale blue that blended with the highlights of her short gray hair. Kitty needed glasses as much as her cousin, but she only wore them in emergencies.

"Did I tell you about Anna's Patrick?" Kitty asked, smoothing her own skirt across her plump knees as carefully as if she were sitting on a dais. "Winning the lottery!"

Mary took her eyes off the dark tunnel to see if Kitty wasn't pulling her leg. Anna was Mary's younger sister.

"Not the big prize", Kitty went on, her eyes dancing. "I think he won a thousand is all."

"A thousand!" Mary cried with a sour grin. "God knows he needs it. He's just a struggling obstetrician," she added with the bitter irony of someone who had put four children through parochial school and never so much as won a bingo prize. "He's salting it away for his brother's education, for when he gets out of the service. You have to admit, Mary, it's a nice gesture. He might have kept it for himself."

"And what will Anna herself do with the money she won a couple months ago? Didn't she just hit the lottery in the spring?"

"She did, yes," Kitty replied, warming to the subject. "She plans to take a cruise. You know, Mary, that's what we should do. Go on a cruise, I mean."

Mary looked at her cousin as if she had just proposed rocketing to the moon. "It doesn't cost as much as you'd think. Of course, Anna's going first class. You know Anna. But we could do it for half the price. And it's cheaper when you travel with someone else, you know. I have some brochures at home."

Mary's hard frown relaxed in amusement. "John would turn over in his grave if he thought I was spending his insurance money on a cruise, of all things."

"He would not. John loved a good time as much as anyone."

"Better!"

"He wouldn't begrudge it to you, Mary."

"He would if he wasn't there to enjoy it himself. Here's another bus now."

A second blue-and-gray behemoth roared out of the underpass. Braking suddenly, it came to a stop just in front of them. Mary rushed to the open door where a Chinese man was alighting.

"Are you the Eighty-Two?" she called up to the driver.

"No, ma'am."

"Can you tell me, do I get the Eighty-Two here?" she asked as the bus began to roll again.

"No, ma'am. Upstairs."

"What did he say, Mary?"

"That's a fine how-do-you-do. This is where I always got off the Eighty-Two when I came back from the city."

"I don't know where I am a-tall," she complained, squinting at the glaring stretches of concrete when she reached the top of the concrete staircase. Kitty was breathing hard from the climb. Nothing was where it should be except the great stanchions of the bridge itself, looking old-fashioned more than half a century after their construction. A corner lot once occupied by an all-too-familiar bar was now a real estate office. Where there used to be a used-car dealer a Brew 'N Burger stood. To the west, the towers of a luxury high-rise had replaced the pink brick buildings of the Academy of the Holy Angels where she had sent her only daughter. But it wasn't so much the changes in the landscape that confused her as it was the difficulty of viewing them on foot for the first time in twenty years.

"There used to be a bus stop," she said, shading her eyes, "over where that knickknack store is. But I don't see any bus stop now, do you?"

Between the sun and her own nearsightedness Kitty could barely make out the other side of the road.

Mary breathed a brief hard sigh that had to take the place of tears, though crying was what she felt like doing. She felt put upon - by New Jersey Transport for changing its route, by the terrible heat, by her own nerves, and by the ordeal of having to exist alone and vulnerable in a changed and unsympathetic world.

She stopped the only other pedestrian in sight.

"Excuse me, mister. Can you tell me where the Eighty-Two bus stops?"

But the man merely hunched his shoulders, mumbled some thing in a foreign accent, and walked on.

She glanced again at the bar-turned-real-estate-office, then squinted toward the shopping district half a mile south of the bridge plaza.

Kitty said, "Maybe we could take a cab."

Three taxicabs were parked opposite the Brew 'N Burger.

Mary hadn't taken a cab in ten years, not since she used to meet her late husband for dinner and a show at Radio City. But this was an emergency. "Sure, what the heck," she said, heading toward the car at the head of the line.

"Excuse me," she said, bending toward the open window on the curb side. The driver was chewing a cigar and reading a newspaper he had spread across the steering wheel. "Can you tell me how much it would be to go to the Madonna Cemetery?"

The man shifted the cigar to the opposite side of his mouth and turned the page of his newspaper.

"Ten dollars."

Uncomprehending, Mary continued to peer through the cab's window.

"We only want to go one-way."

The driver darted a glance at her gray permanent, then at her insubstantial chest and returned to his newspaper. "Ten bucks, lady."

She stood up straight and began walking rapidly in the opposite direction.

"What did he say, Mary?"

"He said ten dollars," she replied, her legs moving vigorously. "For that price he can go jump in the lake."

Kitty caught up and matched her cousin's stride until they were back at the overpass again. Mary felt lightheaded from her sprint and the flush of anger she had endured. Putting her fingers to her throat, she said, "This heat is giving me a terrible thirst. Maybe we could get something to drink in the Brew 'N Burger."

"Sure, what do we have to lose?"

The Brew 'N Burger was closed.

"Now what do we do? We could be stranded in a desert, for the love of God. If you don't own a car, you're out of luck these days. We may as well head toward Main Street. At least there's a soda shop there."

They linked arms and crossed the viaduct under which they had met. Highways stretched west as far as they could see: 46, 4, and the new Interstate that could take you all the way to California. The walkway was shielded by a concrete wall, but they held tight to each other, both having a fear of heights.

"There used to be a movie theatre," Mary said as they passed a rubble-strewn lot. "They tore it down. God knows why. It couldn't have been ten years old. Tommy's school stood right beside it. They tore that down too and built a new one. A convent as well. There aren't many of them left - the nuns, I mean."

When they reached the next intersection she said, "It's all changed so much." She squinted up at the billboard on a traffic island where a war memorial used to stand. "The bank was right here." She frowned at a rococo facade that might have housed a catering hall or a funeral home equally well. "I wonder if Schweitzer's is still around." She peered down the narrow strip of macadam which used to be the town's main drag. A big new marquee caught her eye. I used to buy the kids' school clothes there."

But she could make out nothing else familiar among the closed store fronts. The sidewalks themselves were deserted, though car traffic was thick enough. A cream-colored Mercedes was stopped for the light, a black man at the wheel. In her own day you would have looked hard and long to spot a black face.

"Is that a diner, Mary?"

It was hard to tell what it was Kitty was pointing at. Gilt-edged like a fairy castle, it perched on a sky-blue base high above street level. Two young faces made up like Halloween masks peered down at them from behind tinted glass.

"I think it is a diner, Mary."

"For the love of God. Could that be the old Fort Lee Diner? John used to go there after his toots. And there I was feeding him nothing but broiled meat and fresh vegetables for his bad stomach." Kitty squinted up at the big sign on the roof like a tourist being shown an Egyptian monument. Then she urged her cousin forward. "This place looks like the Taj Mahal!" Mary said, digging in her heels. "There must be someplace else we could stop. I only want a glass of iced tea!"

Kitty was dying of thirst as well, but after twenty feet it was all a blurry wasteland to her.

"What's that, Mary?" she said, pointing to a red and blue glow across the street.

Mary narrowed her eyes at the neon. "Can you beat that? The same bar that was there twenty years ago."

"Maybe we could get a soda."

Mary stared hard at the Schafer beer sign as if confronting an old adversary. She sighed, this time in resignation. "Why not," she said. "What difference could it make now?"

It was dark inside and cold. The two women stood waiting for their eyes to adjust. A young woman materialized and asked if they would like a table.

"We would," Kitty replied with her best smile. They followed the young woman to a table in a dark corner well away from some noisy teenagers. Mary scowled at them. John would have told her to sit back and enjoy herself. She would have done nothing of the kind if she didn't feel like it. But the mere fact of his telling her what to do would have made it possible for her to know her own mind better.

The waitress reappeared and asked for their order.

"What will you have, Mary?"

She wanted iced tea. But they didn't serve iced tea - only Coke and ginger ale. "I suppose," she said, trying to sound offhanded, "a beer."

"A beer, Mary! You're living dangerously."

"I might as well go to hell with myself."

She hadn't had a beer since her husband's death. She disliked effervescence. Scotch was her drink, on the rocks. But on a hot day at John's insistence, maybe once a year, she would agree to drink a beer. It seemed to give her husband great pleasure to fill a glass for her with the gassy liquid. If for no other reason, she had avoided it on that account.

"It's good!" Kitty declared as if, herself an inveterate beer drinker, she had just discovered the beverage. Her glass was already half-empty. The bottle, also half-empty, stood sweating on the table.

"It's queer the way things turn out," Mary said. "I mean, all the years I put up with his shenanigans."

"John liked his beer," Kitty replied, her eyes festive again.

"He was a devil sometimes. A regular demon." Mary stared down at the plastic tablecloth, her brow gnarled with memory. "You can't imagine the grief he caused me. And four kids to be raised in the bargain. It was no joke, I can tell you. Sneak out in the middle of the night, and not come back till the next day. Sometimes the next week. I had my plate full with his shenanigans."

Kitty smiled and sipped some more beer.

"And here I am now with nobody," Mary went on, more in wonder than sadness. "All I wanted all those years was a moment's peace. Now all I've got is peace. From one end of the day to the next. I could open a business."

"You miss him," Kitty said.

Mary's brow creased. For half a minute she didn't say anything.

"I woke up the other night - it must have been three or four A.M. And would you believe it? I could feel him in the bed beside me." She glanced cautiously toward her cousin's blue eyes. Kitty, the lifelong virgin, nodded encouragement. "His back was against mine. I thought at first I must be dreaming. But I wasn't. I'm sure I wasn't. I could feel him against me just as sure as I can feel this chair I'm sitting on. Which is odd," she said, lifting the glass to her mouth again, "because for the last ten years we slept in twin beds."

She stared down at the soiled tablecloth while Kitty regarded her with the untroubled affection of six decades. But Mary was thinking that her dead husband's presence in the bed beside her wasn't all there had been to that episode the other night. It was odd she should only be recalling the details now.

"Are you alright, Mary? Is the beer too strong?"

"I'm fine," she replied. "It just struck me that there were words as well. The other night, I mean. My own, of course."

"Of course."

"I was telling him I was cold. To put another blanket on the bed. You know how easily I get cold."

"I do."

"But he wouldn't wake up. John never did unless you kicked him."

"Did you kick him, Mary?"

"I don't remember," she said, blushing. "You should keep in mind I was only half-awake." She lowered her voice. "I'd feel like a damned fool telling this to anyone else."

"Sure, we have no secrets, do we, Mary? Drink up. I'll order another beer for you."

"No, I couldn't."

"Then you'll split one with me."

Kitty called the waitress and the woman brought a freshly beaded bottle, depositing it on the table like a benediction between the two elderly women.

"The mind's a queer thing," Mary observed after Kitty had half-filled her glass from the new bottle. "I'd think I was going balmy if it didn't seem so real, even now."

"Some things are like that."

"Can you imagine my telling him to get me a blanket? And him dead three years?"

Kitty shook her head in appropriate amazement.

"They could take me away and lock me up," Mary said as if that were exactly what she thought someone ought to do.

"You were just cold," Kitty assured her.

But Mary was not to be so easily mollified. "I don't know if I kicked him or not," she said. "But I wouldn't be surprised if I tried. That was what I always did when he was still alive. He was such a confounded sound sleeper." Her eyes suddenly filled up. As if connected to the same interior plumbing, Kitty's own eyes glazed over. "The poor man can't even rest in peace!"

Mary's lips began to tremble. A tear trickled down each side of her high straight nose. She removed the hankie from her dress sleeve and wiped her eyes.

"You miss him, Mary."

Mary pressed her lips together. Then she said, "You spend your whole life wishing you didn't have to put up with someone. Then when they're gone you start imagining them right back where they were."

She pressed the crumpled tissue to her face while Kitty regarded her as calmly as if she were merely putting on fresh lipstick. Then Mary suddenly looked down at the gold watch on her wrist, a Bulova her husband had given her the year before his death. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The cemetery will be closed, and here we sit getting soused." She stood up abruptly, almost causing the empty beer bottle to topple. "That's all I need to do - miss his anniversary. For sure, he'd never let me rest in peace!"

She headed for the door. Kitty squared the bill quickly, leaving a generous tip, quickly arranged her green hat more securely on her blond curls, and slung her handbag over her shoulder. Then she hurried to catch up with her cousin, who had already rushed out into the hot sun.