It is too hot to fuck. It is damn-well too hot to breathe. But the second is necessary; and the first, whatever he'd thought 30 years ago, is not.

They lie apart on the sheet in pajama bottom and opaque nightgown. Too hot for these, as well, but the kids and grandkids are here. After an eternity he sleeps.

The lightning rouses him. It was close, but there is no afterglow to suggest fire. He lies there appreciating the breeze for a moment until the rain drums in. He is reaching to lower the first window when he really wakes up. This is the sleeping porch. The deck had taken twelve years' rainstorms, and winter snows for that matter, before the walls went up.

He smiles more nastily than Ginnie would like to see and goes down the hall to Cheryl's room. He pounds on the door until Kevin sounds awake.

"Gully washer. Close your window. I'll get the kids."

He goes into the grandchildren's room. The doorway still has muggy air though he can feel sudden coolness two-thirds of the way to the window. He drops the window down to one inch above the sill, grabs all the grands' treasures from the sill, and drops them at the foot of David's bunk. He leaves the door open.

He lowers the bathroom window to the same one-inch clearance. He pisses. He wipes himself down with a washcloth, soaks the cloth again, and takes it and two towels with him. He closes the windows from the sleeping porch into the living room on the way back.

Ginnie is awake. She wipes her face and neck with the washcloth.

"Finish the job. No one is going to see us."

She strips and dabs herself. The breeze has already cooled the room and stray drops hit him where he stands. He drops his pajamas, and she slides over.

They kiss. She had found tiny lines around that mouth and thinks herself aged. He finds a tongue that knows every crevice of his mouth and just what it does to him. This was the sweet mouth he'd kissed when he didn't know how, but it was more. This mouth had said, "I do." When the first company was going down the toilet, and he told her that she could take what her father had built -- this lodge included -- if she left, this mouth had said one word, "Never." He kisses all of that.

He kisses down her neck and down to her breast. It is a lot looser than when he'd first touched it. She has started to go back to hiding them from him, as she did at first. But she really can't hide her breasts from him. There, he had cried when Billy was in the hospital, and they realized that the bankruptcy that they had feared and cursed and wailed over had really taken jack shit from them. He'd seen them suckle two children, and she'd let him taste. He could see them in his mind however hidden from his eyes.

The nipple still knows him and perks right up. As he sucks there, he drinks loyalty, shared terror, and shared passion. She stirs as she has stirred, as she stirred at seventeen.

He kisses down her belly. It is wider and looser than the belly he rested his head on at 16 as he told his dreams to his girlfriend, giving of his egotism in the only generosity a young man knows. It has held two children as well as its share of good food. It yields still its quota of memories. He lay on this belly in bliss on his honeymoon, sated for the moment but seeing the breasts rise inches from him. He saw this belly round with the life that they had started. He had been kicked through this belly and left many trails with his lips, matching this one, down to her muff.

Each trail has informed the next, leaving blazes in his mind if not on her skin. This way to the navel tickle. This way to the fur. This way to the sniff of her want. This way to the glorious taste. This way to the proof of desire. This way to the entry to glory. This way to the tunnel of love. This way to the ecstasy. This way, twice if never again, to the awe and terror of parentage. This way, finally, to satiation and sleep.

"We shouldn't," she says in her lovely voice. Meaning they would.

He'd come to her with a choice. He could stay an employee, or he could throw everything in the pot for a new business.

"We could lose everything," he'd said.

"Not everything," she'd said. "Not the kids, not us, not our love. Just the peripherals." He loved that voice. He'd loved it before then, but he loved it more since then.

Love and desire are a little different, however. He reaches her valley and her scent. Until now, he could have cuddled her to express his love. Now, lust starts to harden him.

Her mortise is drier than it was before the hysterectomy. It isn't as dry as it was in the field that day, though. If he could go back, he would kick that young animal in the butt, though his hip pains him enough as it is on wet days. This beautiful spirit had offered up her unwilling body to him, and he'd been too stupid and greedy to realize that. The present dryness will cause no hurt, but it does not provide the wealth that he spread over her folds in the years between. He deals with that.