Chapter 4

I didn’t sleep. Jolene did — out cold, arm heavy across me — and somewhere near four I gave up and went out to the deck in my shorts and sat in the cold with the lake black in front of me and listened to a quiet house like a man listening for a fire.

Russ came out at five with two coffees. He sat down in the other chair and handed me one and for a while neither of us said anything, and that part was still us. Thirty years in that silence. That part hadn’t broke.

“Before you ask,” he said finally, “she cried some. First off. Not sad — I don’t think sad. Just a lot in her at once.” He looked at his coffee. “I held off. Told her we could stop and I’d sleep on the couch and nobody’d ever say a word. You know what she told me?”

I waited.

“She said, ‘I have been good for fifteen years and I am so tired of good it makes me sick.’ Then she asked me — she asked me, Dan. Plain. So whatever you’re building in your head about last night, unbuild it. It wasn’t me taking anything. It was her, finally picking something up she’d wanted a long time.”

The sun was coming up gray over the water. My coffee went cold in my hand.

“She said your name once,” Russ said. “In the middle of it. Not—” he shook his head. “Not like she was thinking of you instead. Like you were just in her. Part of the furniture of her, I guess. I don’t know how to say it better.”

“Don’t try,” I said.

We sat there till the light came up, and we were still Russ and Dan. I want that on the record too. Whatever else was true, we were still Russ and Dan.

Breakfast was Jolene’s doing — bacon, eggs, her at the stove in Russ’s shirt and nothing else anybody could see, talking a mile a minute about nothing, working at it. Russ read the room and played along. Carrie came in last in her own robe with her hair a wreck and she could not look at me. She got coffee and stood at the counter the way she had the morning before, and the whole night stood in the kitchen with us.