The day before Walter left for Saskatchewan, her heart began to race. It was just a thing her heart was doing, this racing. The next morning, after she drove Walter to the airstrip in Grand Rapids and returned to the house, it was racing so much that an egg slipped out of her hand and fell on the floor while she was making pancake batter. She put her hands on the counter and took deep breaths before kneeling down to clean it up. The finish work in the kitchen had been left for Walter to do at some later date, but grouting the new tile floor ought to have been within Richard’s capabilities, and he hadn’t gotten to it yet. On the plus side, as he’d told them, he’d taught himself to play the banjo.

Though the sun had been up for four hours, it was still fairly early morning when he emerged from his bedroom in jeans and a T-shirt advertising his support for Subcomandante Marcos and the liberation of Chiapas.

“Buckwheat pancakes?” Patty said brightly.

“Sounds great.”

“I could fry you some eggs if you’d rather.”

“I like a good pancake.”

“Easy enough to do some bacon, too.”

“I wouldn’t say no to bacon.”

“OK! Pancakes and bacon it will be.”

If Richard’s heart was racing also, he gave no sign of it. She stood and watched him put away two stacks of pancakes, holding his fork in the civilized grip that she happened to know Walter had taught him as a freshman at college.

“What are your plans for the day?” he asked her with low to moderate interest.

“Gosh. I hadn’t thought about it. Nothing! I’m on vacation. I think I’m going to do nothing this morning, and then make you some lunch.”

He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.

She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over. A melodious bird that Walter had despaired of teaching her the proper name of, a veery or a vireo, grew accustomed to her presence and began to sing in a tree directly above her. Its song was like an idée fixe that it couldn’t get out of its little head.

How she felt: as if a ruthless and well-organized party of resistance fighters had assembled under cover of the darkness of her mind, and so it was imperative not to let the spotlight of her conscience shine anywhere near them, not even for one second. Her love of Walter and her loyalty to him, her wish to be a good person, her understanding of Walter’s lifelong competition with Richard, her sober appraisal of Richard’s character, and just the all-around shittiness of sleeping with your spouse’s best friend: these superior considerations stood ready to annihilate the resistance fighters. And so she had to keep the forces of conscience fully diverted. She couldn’t even allow herself to consider how she was dressing-she had to instantly deflect the thought of putting on a particular flattering sleeveless item before taking midmorning coffee and cookies out to Richard, she had to flick that thought right away from her-because the tiniest hint of ordinary flirting would attract the searchlight, and the spectacle it illuminated would be just too revolting and shameful and pathetic. Even if Richard wasn’t disgusted by it, she herself would be. And if he noticed it and called her out on it, the way he’d called her out on her drinking: disaster, humiliation, the worst.

Her pulse, however, knew-and was telling her with its racing-that she would probably not have another chance like this. Not before she was fully over the hill physically. Her pulse was registering her keen covert awareness that the fishing camp in Saskatchewan could only be reached by biplane, radio, or satellite phone, and that Walter would not be calling her in the next five days unless there was an emergency.

She left Richard’s lunch on the table and drove to the nearby tiny town of Fen City. She could see how easily she could have a traffic accident, and became so lost in imagining herself killed and Walter sobbing over her mutilated body and Richard stoically comforting him that she almost ran the only stop sign in Fen City; she dimly heard the screaming of her brakes.

It was all in her head, it was all in her head! The only thing that gave her any hope was how well she was concealing her own inner turmoil. She’d been maybe a little abstracted and shaky in the last four days, but infinitely better behaved than she’d been in February. If she herself was managing to keep her dark forces hidden, it stood to reason that Richard might have corresponding dark forces that he was doing just as good a job of hiding. But this was a tiny sliver of hope indeed; it was the way insane people lost in fantasies reasoned.

She stood in front of the Fen City Co-op’s meager selection of domestic beers, the Millers and the Coorses and the Budweisers, and tried to make a decision. Held a sixpack in her hand as if she might be able to judge in advance, through the aluminum of the cans, how she would feel if she drank it. Richard had told her to cool it with the drinking; she’d been ugly to him drunk. She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. And yet the autobiographer now envies and pities the younger Patty standing there in the Fen City Co-op and innocently believing that she’d reached the bottom: that, one way or another, the crisis would be resolved in the next five days.

A chubby teenage girl at the cash register had taken an interest in her paralysis. Patty gave her a lunatic smile and went and got a plastic-wrapped chicken and five ugly potatoes and some humble, limp leeks. The only thing worse than inhabiting her anxiety undrunk, she decided, would be to be drunk and still inhabiting it.

“I’m going to roast a chicken for us,” she told Richard when she got home.

Flecks of sawdust were resting in his hair and eyebrows and sticking to his sweaty, broad forehead. “That’s very nice of you,” he said.

“Deck’s looking really great,” she said. “It’s a wonderful improvement. How much longer do you think it’s going to take?”

“Couple of days, maybe.”

“You know, Walter and I can finish it up ourselves if you want to get back to New York. I know you meant to be back there by now.”

“It’s good to see a job finished,” he said. “It won’t be more than a couple of days. Unless you’re wanting to be alone here?”

“Do I want to be alone here?”

“I mean, it’s a lot of noise.”

“Oh, no, I like construction noise. It’s very comforting somehow.”