“It seems to be.”

“Good. Good.” He stood there nodding, looking about in the light from the kitchen. His shirttails out, cuffs turned back. Blue jeans and black loafers. Smiling at her uncertainly. “You look nice,” he said. “Did you teach?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Nodding. Checking his watch. “Have you eaten?”

She locked up and they crossed the darkened street, their footsteps lost in the scuffling sounds of two boys playing basketball in the spilled light of a garage. April cool but a feeling of the coming summer too, the hardest months. He followed her in and shut the door and offered to take her jacket but she kept it despite the warmth of the room. The air was densely spiced with the roast he’d been cooking for much of the day. He did something with computers and could work from home.

He turned down the music, an opera, and stepped into the large open kitchen and picked up the bottle. “Italian,” he said. “Insanely good.” He poured her a glass and she came to the bright plum color of it and sat in one of the high bar chairs and watched him lifting lids, stirring the steam, giving names to the smells. One thing he’d learned was food. Another was wine, though he wasn’t a bore about it. His hair was gray but had not thinned and there was the cowlick at the front, a springy disobeying forelock he wore long, like something from his youth he couldn’t give up, like something which served him still.

He stirred and spiced and tasted, talking all the while. It might’ve been a summer night with the children chasing fireflies over the back lawn, the dog, a little terrier, yapping in dismay.

Both boys in college now and the terrier, like Pepé, buried under a tree.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Hmm?”

He indicated her glass.

“Oh. No, it’s lovely.” She raised it for a sip.

He had good manners and would not ask after her family nor talk about his boys. He talked about his house and the improvements he would like to make this summer and the Chinese elms he was thinking about planting.

“Do you know a good realtor?” Angela said.

He stopped stirring to look at her. “A realtor?”

“Yes.”

He stood there. The thick, wet blurpings of the sauce. He turned back and began stirring again, but absently.

“I’ve done some work for a couple of them,” he said. “People speak very highly of Leslie Brown. I’ll give you her info.”

“Thank you.”

He checked the roast and lowered the flames under the pots and they took their glasses to the living room. She had always admired Caroline’s taste, and she let herself sink into the deep sofa, fabric the color and fineness of a wheat field in a painting. There had been a time, a very long time, when she could not admire, could not even notice; pleasure lay at the bottom of the sea. She toed the sneakers from her feet and put her head back. Robert joined her on the sofa, crossing an ankle over his knee. On the mantel were the same pictures in their silver frames: Peter and James growing up and grown. He and Caroline much younger. The dog alive. Everybody happy.

The male tenor began to sing, the notes rich and pure.

Robert sipped his wine and held the glass to the light.

“I saw him today,” he said.

“Saw who?” She rolled her head on the sofa back. She was tired. It took her a minute.

“Oh,” she said, and sat up a little. “Where?”

“At the gym. My gym. He has joined, apparently.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say.

“I was just coming out of the steam room and he was just coming in. Five minutes earlier and there we would have been. Like Romans.”

“I’m so sorry, Robert.” She touched his forearm.

“Ah, shit—that’s life, right? You run into the man your wife prefers to sleep with. One day we’ll go for a beer, he and I. Watch a bit of the game. He’ll turn out to be a pretty good egg. Life goes on. Isn’t that the idea?”

“No,” she said. “That’s not the idea.”

He looked at her and his face changed. He uncrossed his leg and turned to her. “I’m sorry, Angela. I’m an idiot. I—”

She shook her head, “No, I didn’t mean that. I was only saying . . . I was only saying I’m sorry, that you had to go through that today.”

“It’s nothing. Christ. It’s so trivial.”

“It’s not nothing,” she said.

He glanced at the mantel and then looked down. He seemed to be studying the sofa, the square of cushion plumped and risen between them like bread.

Outside, in the window, trees reared in a wave of sweeping light, appeared to pirouette, lapsed again into darkness. A man said gently: “Come on, we haven’t got all night.” There was the jingle of shaken tags.

She reached to touch the fallen forelock. Training it back, hopelessly. He looked up. His entire story in those eyes. Story of the world.

“Can we just be quiet for a while?” she said. “Can we just sit here and listen to the music?”

67

They took the blue Chevy, Grant at the wheel, and they smoked and said nothing, staring out at the darkness and the traffic and the signs and the tire tracks in the snow and the setting moon, and she was safe, the sheriff said, she was in no danger. Every mile taking them that much farther from the mountains where’d she gone missing and where all the men and all the searching and all the hours in the world never would have found her, she was fine and resting and they shouldn’t hurry. The lights and the land rushing by at that unreal hour and wondering had she seen this, and this, that day so long ago in the strange car, in broad daylight. They wanted to speak just to know it was real, but they did not trust the sound of their own voices not to rip it all apart, road and mountain and moon and truck, throwing them back to their beds and to the dawn and a heartbreak all the greater for how much they’d believed. And what would they say anyway that they didn’t already know without saying? She was safe, she was resting. There was nothing else to know and nothing to do but to get to her, and when they saw her, when they truly believed in this night, then they would make the phone call, and this too was understood without either of them saying it.

The sheriff didn’t want them driving at that time of night in the mountains; he wanted to send his other deputy down to get them, but the deputy would have been an hour just getting to the ranch and it was that hour that ended the discussion.

Grant followed the sheriff’s directions at least and did not take the Loveland Pass but drove ten miles beyond it and came back from the west on the state highway, and at last they saw the lights of the little resort town and they saw the blue hospital sign and they located the emergency entrance and Grant parked in the first space he saw without reading any more signs and they crushed their cigarettes in the tray and stepped out of the truck.

The sheriff awaited them outside, leaning against the wall near the glass doors, and the sight of him swung Grant back in time to a different hospital, different child, but same sheriff waiting. He and the boy crossed the parking lot and as they stepped up to him the sheriff unleaned himself from the wall and removed his hat that his face not be in shadow, and the gesture stopped them both cold.

“She’s fine,” Kinney said, raising his hand. “She’s just fine.”

“Where is she?” said Grant.

“You can’t see her, not just yet.”

“The hell I can’t.” He took a step and the sheriff caught him by the arm.

“She’s in with the surgeon, Grant.”

“The surgeon. You said she was fine.”

“She is fine. She’s not in any danger. It’s just that, well . . .” He tapped his hatbrim against his leg.

“Joe. Just tell us.”

He told them, there in the humming yellow light, speaking evenly and accurately, and when he was finished Grant and the boy stood still. Kinney tried to imagine what it would be like to be this man before him, this father, hearing such things. His own daughter unconscious within the building. He could not.