“I’ve felt so guilty.”

“I don’t want an apology.”

“Hitting you, saying the things I said… I was out of control. I’ve never been that way before. Never in my life. I was everything I always prayed I’d never be.”

“You had a good teacher.” Portia tapped the photo of their father. “Got your right hook from him, it felt like.”

Lis didn’t smile; she felt ill with shame and anger. She looked now for signs of forgiveness, softening. But Portia merely sat hugging her glass and staring-almost bored, it seemed-into the greenhouse. The eerie moaning of the wind continued.

Absently, Lis said, “I went to the Dairy Queen the other day. Remember it?”

“They’re still around? I haven’t been inside one for years.”

“No, remember. There is no inside.”

“That’s right. Sure.”

Lis pictured them as young girls, with their Dutch bodyguard Jolande, buying the soft vanilla cones at a little screen window and sitting on a sticky picnic bench beside the parking lot. During the day bees hovered, and at night moths and beetles died fast, brilliant deaths as they flew into the mesmerizing purple glow of the bug zapper.

“We’d get the cherry coatings,” the younger sister squinted as she recalled.

“And the ice cream was always melting and running down the cone. It was always a race-trying to lick it off before it got to our hands.”

“Sure, I remember.”

They fell silent, as the whine from the wind grew more piercing. Lis walked to the greenhouse and closed the vent tightly. The sound waned but didn’t cease completely. When she returned she said, “I never mentioned it to you, Portia, but I had an affair last spring, and there are some things I have to tell you about it.”

He cruises at seventy miles an hour, the tach on the dash edging red on the uphill grades, the engine a tortured whine. Owen Atcheson passes the Sav-Mor, now closed, the plate glass taped with huge X’s, as if instead of a fall storm a hurricane is anticipated. Then he speeds past a housing development, and beyond that, the Ford dealership, the blue and red sign turning slowly in the sky like a lighthouse beacon.

Then Route 236 begins to curve through the hills that border Ridgeton-the hills that are also part of the same geologic glitch that, two hours away, rises high above the stone valley of Indian Leap, where Robert Gillespie had died broken and bloody.

Owen slows to take these turns then speeds again to fifty, hurrying through the red light at the intersection of 116. The road now rises along the crest of a long hill and he catches a glimpse of water thirty feet below him, off to the right. From the dark creek rise the spindly black legs of the old Boston, Hartford & New York railroad trestle. He slows for the road’s only hairpin turn and lifts his foot off the brake to accelerate onto the long straightaway that will take him into downtown Ridgeton.

The beige Subaru seems to drift leisurely from the cleft of bushes where it was hidden, pointed nose out. Owen sees, however, that the car’s rear wheels spin furiously, shooting mud and water behind them, and the import is actually moving at a good clip. In the instant before the huge hollow bang, he thinks he might escape, so close do the vehicles approach without striking. Then the car hits the Cherokee solidly amidships with a terrible jolt that twists Owen’s neck badly. Pain explodes in his face with a burst of yellow light.

The Subaru stops short of the cliff ’s edge as the truck eases over the side. It teeters for what seems an eternity, giving Owen Atcheson plenty of time to see the face of Michael Hrubek, a mere six feet away. He’s grinning madly, pounding on the wheel, and shouting as he tries frantically, it seems, to make himself heard. Owen stares back but never does figure out what the message might be because just then the truck lurches forward and starts its plunge toward the creek far below.

Portia laughed shortly and asked with astonishment, “You? An affair?”

The older sister’s eyes were fixed on the sheets of gray rain that cascaded down the windows.

“Me. Wouldn’t’ve guessed, would you?”

There, Lis thought. I’ve done it. The first time I’ve confessed. To anyone. There’s lightning nearby but so far it hasn’t struck me dead.

“You never said anything.” Portia was clearly amused. “I had no clue.”

“I was afraid, I guess. That Owen would find out. You know him. That temper of his.”

“Why would I tell Owen?”

“I didn’t think you would. It just seemed to me that the more people who knew, the more the chance word would get out.” She paused. “Well, there’s something else too… I was ashamed. I was afraid of what you’d think.”

“Me? Why on earth?”

“An affair isn’t anything to be proud of.”

“Were you just fucking? Or were you in love?”

Lis was offended, yet Portia’s question seemed motivated merely by curiosity. “No, no, no. It wasn’t just physical. We were in love. I really don’t know why I didn’t tell you before. I should have. There’ve been too many secrets between us.” She glanced at her sister. “Owen had an affair too.”

The young woman nodded knowingly. Lis was horrified that Portia had somehow learned this already. But, no, it turned out that she’d simply pegged Owen as a man with a wandering eye.

This offended Lis too. “Well, it was only one time,” she said defensively.

“Frankly, Lis, I’m surprised you waited as long as you did to find somebody.”

“How can you say that?” Lis retorted. “I’m not the sort…” Her voice faded.

“Not like me?” her sister asked wryly.

“I mean that I wasn’t looking for anyone. We were trying to work it out, Owen and me. He’d given up the woman he was seeing and we were making a conscious effort-”

“Conscious effort.”

Lis listened for mockery and believed she heard none. She continued doggedly, “-an effort to keep our marriage together. The affair… just happened.”

She’d begun the liaison at an awkward time, right in the middle of the terrible sequence of last winter: Owen’s affair, the slow death of her mother, her increased discontent with teaching, taking over the estate… The worst possible time, she thought, then reflected: As if there’s a convenient moment for cataclysm.

Lis’s affair, unlike the tidy Hollywood version that she imagined Owen’s to have been, had tormented her mercilessly. It would’ve been far easier, she told herself, if she’d been able to separate the dick from the soul. But she couldn’t and so of course she fell in love-as her paramour did with her. At first, Lis admitted, she was partly drawn to her lover out of retaliation. It was petty, yes, but there it was-she wanted to get even with Owen. Besides, she found, she simply couldn’t control herself. The affair was all-consuming.

Portia asked, “It’s over now?”

“Yes, it’s over.”

“Well, what’s the big deal?”

“Oh,” Lis said bitterly, “but it is a big deal. I haven’t told you everything.”

Lis opened her mouth to speak and for an unbearable moment she was about to confess everything. She truly believed that she was going to blurt out every scathing fact.

And she probably would have if the car hadn’t arrived just then.

Portia turned from her sister and looked out the kitchen window toward the driveway.

“Owen!” Lis stared out the window, both overjoyed at his arrival and bitterly disappointed that the conversation with her sister was being interrupted.

They walked into the kitchen and peered through the sheets of rain.

“No, I don’t think it’s him,” her sister said slowly. They watched the headlights make their snaking way along the driveway. Lis counted the flares as the beams hit the orange reflectors along the route. Portia was right. Although she couldn’t make out the vehicle clearly through the bushes and trees, it was light-colored; Owen’s Cherokee truck was black as a gun barrel.