The reluctant couple

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Standing at the kitchen sink in the small duplex she shared with her husband, Roger, Diane Slater stared gloomily out through the window at the cold, rolling fog which had come in over San Francisco's Richmond District from the ocean. Damn, but she hated the fog! It made everything so dark and cheerless, so lonely.

She finished washing the last of the breakfast dishes and put them in the rack to drip dry. Then she emptied the dishpan and wiped her hands on a dishtowel. In the living room, she fluffed the couch cushions and straightened the magazines on the coffee table and emptied the ashtrays — every day, prosaic chores, fraught with dullness.

She wished it were tomorrow, Saturday, and Roger were home. At least they could get out then, go for a ride down the coast to Monterey or across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County, anywhere just so long as they got out of The City for a few hours. But it wasn't Saturday, and Roger wasn't home. Roger was making neat columns of figures in his ledger books, or whatever it was Chief Accountants at Waller, Waller, Crist, and Maxwell did during, working hours.

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