“Unless it’s your neighbors.”

“Well, I hate those neighbors, so that’s different.”

“Right.”

“So maybe I’ll get working on that chicken.”

She must have betrayed something in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. “You OK?”

“No no no,” she said, “I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn’t solve anything, if you know what I mean. But I love getting up in the morning. I love smelling the air.”

“I meant are you OK with my being here.”

“Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we’ve been friends with you for so long, but I’ve hardly ever really talked to you. It’s a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn’t feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I’m so used to being alone up here. It’s fine.”

This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.

“I’m just trying to hear what you’re actually saying,” Richard said. “Whether you actually want me here or not.”

“God,” she said, “I keep saying it, don’t I? Didn’t I just say it?”

She could see his patience with her, his patience with a female, reach its end. He rolled his eyes and picked up a section of two-by-four. “I’m going to wrap up here and then go for a swim.”

“It’s going to be cold.”

“Every day a little bit less so.”

Going back into the house, she experienced a cramp of envy of Walter, who was allowed to tell Richard that he loved him, and who wanted nothing destabilizing in return, nothing worse than to be loved himself. How easy men had it! She felt in comparison like a bloated sedentary spider, spinning her dry web year after year, waiting. She suddenly understood how the girls of years ago had felt, the girls of college who’d resented Walter’s free pass with Richard and been irritated by his pesky presence. She saw Walter, for a moment, as Eliza had seen him.

I might have to do it, I might have to do it, I might have to do it, she said to herself while washing the chicken and assuring herself that she didn’t actually mean it. She heard a splash from the lake and watched Richard swimming out in tree shadow toward water still gilded with afternoon light. If he really hated sunshine, the way he claimed to in his old song, northern Minnesota in June was a trying place to be. The days lasted so long that you found yourself surprised the sun wasn’t running low on fuel by the end of them. Just kept burning and burning. She yielded to an impulse to grab herself between the legs, to test the waters, for the shock of it, in lieu of going for a swim herself. Am I alive? Do I possess a body?

There were very odd angles in her cutting of the potatoes. They looked like some kind of geometric brainteaser.

Richard, after his shower, came into the kitchen in a textless T-shirt that must have been bright red some decades earlier. His hair was momentarily subdued, a youthful shiny black.

“You changed your look this winter,” he remarked to Patty.

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? Your hair’s different, you look great.”

“Really hardly any different. Just a tiny bit different.”

“And-possibly put on a little weight?”

“No. Well. A little.”

“You look good with it. You look better not so skinny.”

“Is that a nice way of saying I’ve gotten fat?”

He shut his eyes and grimaced as if trying to remain patient. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Where is this bullshit coming from?”

“Ah?”

“Do you want me to leave? Is that it? There’s this weird phony thing you’re doing that gives me the impression you’re not comfortable with me here.”

The roasting chicken smelled like something of the sort she used to eat. She washed her hands and dried them, rummaged in the back of an unfinished cabinet, and found a bottle of cooking sherry covered with construction dust. She filled a juice glass with it and sat down at the table. “OK, frankly? I’m a little nervous around you.”

“Don’t be.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You have no reason to be.”

This was what she hadn’t wanted to hear. “I’m having this one glass,” she said.

“You’ve mistaken me for somebody who gives a shit how much you drink.”

She nodded. “OK. Good. That helps to know.”

“You’ve been wanting a drink this whole time? Jesus. Have a drink.”

“Doing just that.”

“You know, you’re a very strange person. I mean that as a compliment.”

“So taken.”

“Walter got very, very lucky.”

“Ho, well, that’s the unfortunate thing, isn’t it. I’m not sure he sees it that way anymore.”

“Oh, he does. Believe me, he does.”

She shook her head. “I was going to say that I don’t think he likes the things that are strange about me. He likes the good strange all right, but he’s none too happy about the bad strange, and the bad strange is mostly what he gets these days. I was going to say that it’s ironic that you, who don’t seem to mind the bad strange, are not the person I’m married to.”

“You wouldn’t want to be married to me.”

“No, I’m sure it would be very bad. I’ve heard the stories.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, though not surprised.”

“Walter tells me everything.”

“I’m sure he does.”

Out on the lake a duck was quacking about something. Mallards nested in the reedy far corner of it.

“Did Walter ever tell you I slashed Blake’s snow tires?” Patty said.

Richard raised his eyebrows, and she told him the story.

“That’s really fucked up,” he said admiringly, when she’d finished.

“I know. Isn’t it?”

“Does Walter know this?”

“Um. Good question.”

“I take it you don’t tell him everything.”

“Oh, God, Richard, I don’t tell him anything.”

“You really could, I think. You might find he knows a lot more than you think he does.”

She took a deep breath and asked what kinds of secret things Walter knew about her.

“He knows you’re not happy,” Richard said.

“I really don’t think that requires great powers of discernment. What else?”

“He knows you blame him for Joey moving out of the house.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “That I have more or less told him. That doesn’t really count.”

“OK. So why don’t you tell me. Besides the fact that you’re a tireslasher, what does he not know about you?”

When Patty considered this question, all she could see was the great emptiness of her life, the emptiness of her nest, the pointlessness of her existence now that the kids had flown. The sherry had made her sad. “Why don’t you sing me a song while I get dinner on the table. Will you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “Feels a little weird.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just feels weird.”

“You’re a singer. That’s what you do. You sing.”

“I guess I’ve never had the sense that you particularly like what I sing.”

“Sing me ‘Dark Side of the Bar.’ I love that song.”

He sighed and bowed his head and crossed his arms and seemed to fall asleep.

“What?” she said.

“I think I’m going to leave tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”

“OK.”

“There’s not more than two days’ work left. The deck’s already usable as is.”

“OK.” She stood up and put the sherry glass in the sink. “Can I ask why, though? I mean, it’s really nice having you here.”

“It’s just better if I go.”

“OK. Whatever’s best. I think it’s another ten minutes with the chicken, if you want to set the table for us.”

He didn’t stir from the table.

“Molly wrote that song,” he said, after a while. “I really had no business recording it. It was a very schmucky thing of me to do. Deliberate, calculated schmuckiness on my part.”

“It’s really sad and pretty. What were you supposed to do? Not use it?”

“Basically, yeah. Not use it. That would have been the nice thing.”