“You’ll be happy as a clam in a mudflat, then. That’s a promise.” Bill sounded as happy as a clam in a mudflat himself, and I was glad. “Going-ter come down and write a book by the water? Like in the old days? Not that the last couple ain’t been fine, my wife couldn’t put that last one down, but—”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. And then an idea struck me.

“Bill, would you do me a favor before you clean up the driveway and turn Brenda Meserve loose?”

“Happy to if I can,” he said, so I told him what I wanted.

Four days later, I got a little package with this laconic return address: DEN/GEN DELV/Tg-90 (DAVA scoa0. I opened it and shook out twenty photographs which had been taken with one of those little cameras you use once and then throw away.

Bill had filled out the roll with various views of the house, most conveying that subtle air of neglect a place gets when it’s not used enough… even a place that’s caretook (to use Bill’s word) gets that neglected feel after awhile. I barely glanced at these. The first four were the ones I wanted, and I lined them up on the kitchen table, where the strong sunlight would fall directly on them. Bill had taken these from the top of the driveway, pointing the disposable camera down at the sprawl of Sara Laughs. I could see the moss which had grown not only on south wings, as well. I could see the litter of fallen branches and the drifts of pine needles on the driveway. Bill must have been tempted to clear all that away before taking his snaps, but he hadn’t. I’d told him exactly what I wanted—"warts and all” was the phrase I had used—and Bill had given it to me. The bushes on either side of the driveway had thickened a lot since Jo and I had spent any significant amount of time at the lake; they hadn’t exactly run wild, but yes, some of the longer branches did seem to yearn toward each other across the asphalt like separated lovers. Yet what my eye came back to again and again was the stoop at the foot of the driveway. The other resemblances between the photographs and my dreams of Sara Laughs might only be coincidental (or the writer’s often surprisingly practical imagination at work), but I could explain the sunflowers growing out through the boards of the stoop no more than I had been able to explain the cut on the back of my hand.

I turned one of the photos over. On the back, in a spidery script, Bill had written: These jgllows are way early… and trespassing. I flipped back to the picture side. Three sunflowers, growing up through the boards of the stoop. Not two, not four, but three large sunflowers with faces like searchlights. Just like the ones in my dream.

On July 3rd of 1998, I threw two suitcases and my Powerbook in the trunk of my mid-sized Chevrolet, started to back down the driveway, then stopped and went into the house again. It felt empty and somehow forlorn, like a faithful lover who has been dropped and cannot understand why. The furniture wasn’t covered and the power was still on (I understood that The Great Lake Experiment might turn out to be a swift and total failure), but 14 Benton Street felt deserted, all the same. Rooms too full of furniture to echo still did when I walked through them, and everywhere there seemed to be too much dusty light. In my study, the VDT was hooded like an executioner against the dust. I knelt before it and opened one of the desk drawers. Inside were four reams of paper. I took one, started away with it under my arm, then had a second thought and turned back. I had put that provocative photo of Jo in her swimsuit in the wide center drawer. Now I took it, tore the paper wrapping from the end of the ream of paper, and slid the photo halfway in, like a bookmark. if I did perchance begin to write again, and if the writing marched, I would meet Johanna right around page two hundred and fifty.

I left the house, locked the back door, got into my car, and drove away.

I have never been back.

I’d been tempted to go down to the lake and check out the work—which turned out to be quite a bit more extensive than Bill Dean had originally expected—on several occasions. What kept me away was a feeling, never quite articulated by my conscious mind but still very powerful, that I wasn’t supposed to do it that way; that when I next came to Sara, it should be to unpack and stay.

Bill hired out Kenny Auster to shingle the roof, and got Kenny’s cousin, Timmy Larribee, to “scrape the old girl down,” a cleansing process akin to pot-scrubbing that is sometimes employed with log homes. Bill also had a plumber in to check out the pipes, and got my okay to replace some of the older plumbing and the well-pump.

Bill fussed about all these expenses over the telephone; I let him. When it comes to fifth- or sixth-generation Yankees and the expenditure of money, you might as well just stand back and let them get it out of their systems. Laying out the green just seems wrong to a Yankee, somehow, like petting in public. As for myself, I didn’t mind the outgo a bit. I live frugally, for the most part, not out of any moral code but because my imagination, very lively in most other respects, doesn’t work very well on the subject of money. My idea of a spree is three days in Boston, a Red Sox game, a trip to Tower Records and Video, plus a visit to the Wordsworth bookstore in Cambridge. Living like that doesn’t make much of a dent in the interest, let alone the principal; I had a good money manager down in Waterville, and on the day I locked the door of the Derry house and headed west to TR-90, I was worth slightly over five million dollars. Not much compared to Bill Gates, but big numbers for this area, and I could afford to be cheerful about the high cost of house repairs.

That was a strange late spring and early summer for me. What I did mostly was wait, close up my town affairs, talk to Bill Dean when he called with the latest round of problems, and try not to think. I did the Publishers Ig3ekly interview, and when the interviewer asked me if I’d had any trouble getting back to work “in the wake of my bereavement,” I said no with an absolutely straight face. Why not? It was true. My troubles hadn’t started until I’d finished All the yfrom the bp; until then, I had been going on like gangbusters.

In mid-June, I met Frank Arlen for lunch at the Starlite Cafe. The Starlite is in Lewiston, which is the geographical midpoint between his town and mine. Over dessert (the Starlite’s famous strawberry shortcake), Frank asked if I was seeing anyone. I looked at him with surprise.

“What are you gaping at?” he asked, his face registering one of the nine hundred unnamed emotions—this one of those somewhere between amusement and irritation. “I certainly wouldn’t think of it as two-timing Jo. She’ll have been dead four years come August.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not seeing anybody.”

He looked at me silently. I looked back for a few seconds, then started fiddling my spoon through the whipped cream on top of my shortcake. The biscuits were still warm from the oven, and the cream was melting. It made me think of that silly old song about how someone left the cake out in the rain.

“Have you seen anybody, Mike?”

“I’m not sure that’s any business of yours.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake. On your vacation? Did you—”

I made myself look up from the melting whipped cream. “No,” I said.

He was silent for another moment or two. I thought he was getting ready to move on to another topic. That would have been fine with me. Instead, he came right out and asked me if I had been laid at all since Johanna died. He would have accepted a lie on that subject even if he didn’t entirely believe it—men lie about sex all the time. But I told the truth… and with a certain perverse pleasure.

“No.”

“Not a single time?”

“Not a single time.”

“What about a massage parlor? You know, to at least get a—”