He wanted to get up and go to her. Wrap her in his arms and rock her till she melted against him. So many times in the past they'd ended up entwined after hard words. But no longer. Now when she turned from him he kept his distance, afraid she'd refuse him. He didn't know why or where this doubt had originated-was he reading some subtle signal in her eyes that told him to keep his distance?-but it was too strong to be overcome; or else he was too weak.

"So fucked up," he murmured to himself, his hands returning to cover his face.

Grillo's words circled in the darkness.

These are strange times...

Howie had refuted it at the time, but it was true. Whether Fletcher was in Oregon or not, whether TommyRay was alive or not, when a man could no longer put his an,ns around his wife, they were indeed strange times.

Before returning to work on the car he headed upstairs to take a peek at Amy. She'd been sick the last couple of days-her first summer on the planet she'd caught a coldand she lay exhausted in her cot, arms splayed, head to one side. He took a tissue from the box beside the bed and wiped a little gloss of spit from her chin, his touch too gentle to wake her. But somewhere in sleep, she knew her daddy was there, or so he believed. A barely perceptible smile appeared on her bow-lips, and her cheeks dimpled.

He leaned on the railing of the cot and gazed down at her in unalloyed bliss. Fatherhood had been unexpectedthough they'd talked about children many times, they'd decided to wait until their situation had improved-but he didn't regret for a moment the accident that had brought Amy into their lives. She was a gift; a simple sign of the goodness in Creation. All the magic in the world, whether wielded by his father, or the Jaff, or any of the secret powers D'Amour talked about-weren't worth a damn in the face of this simple miracle.

The little time spent with his sleeping beauty thoroughly invigorated him. When he stepped out into the heat again, the problems of a sickly car seemed piffling, and he set to solving them with a will.

After a few minutes of work a light wind started to get up; cooling gusts against his sweaty face. He stood clear of the hood for a moment and drew a deep breath. The wind smelt of the green beyond these gray streets. they would escape there soon, he told himself, and life would be good.

Standing chopping carrots in the kitchen, Jo-Beth paused to watch the wind shaking the unkempt thicket that choked the yard, thought of another yard in another year, and heard Tommy-Ray's voice calling her name out of the past. It had been dark that night in the Grove, but she remembered things having an exquisite luminosity: dirt, trees, reeling stars all filled with meaning.

"Jo-Beth!" Tommy-Ray was yelling, "Something won der.ful!"

"What?" she'd said.

"Outside. Come with me.

She'd resisted him at first. Tommy-Ray was wild sometimes, and the way he was shaking had made her afraid. "I'm not going to do anything to hurt you, " he'd said. "You know that. "

And she had. Unpredictable though he was, he had never shown her anything but love. "We feel things together," he'd said to her. That was true; they had shared feelings from the beginning. "So come on, " he'd said, taking hold of her hand.

And she'd gone, down the yard to where the trees churned against a pinwheel sky. And in her head she'd heard a whispering voice, a voice she'd been waiting to hear for seventeen years without realizing it.

Jo-Beth, it had said. I'm the Jaff. Your Father.

He had appeared then, out of the trees, and she remembered him looking like a picture from Mama's Bible. An Old Testament prophet, bearded and absolute. No doubt he had been wise, in his terrible fashion. No doubt if she'd been able to speak with him, and learn from him, she would not now be living in the grave, drawing only the tiniest breaths for fear of depleting what little supply of sanity remained to her.

But she had been parted from him, the way she'd been parted from Tommy-Ray, and she'd fallen into the arms of the enemy. He was a good man, this enemy, this Howie Katz; a good and loving man. And when they'd slept together for the first time, they had each dreamed of Quiddity, which meant that he was the love of her life. There would be none better. But there were affections that went deeper than found love. There were powers that shaped the soul before it was even born into the world, and they could not be gainsaid. However loving the enemy was, and however good, he would always be the enemy.

She hadn't realized this at first. She'd assumed her unease would disappear as the traumas of the Grove receded, and she learned a new normality. But instead it grew. She started to have dreams about Tommy-Ray, light pouring over his golden face like syrup. And sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, when she was at her most weary, she'd seem to hear her father speaking to her, and she'd ask him under her breath the question she'd asked in Mama's backyard.

"Why are you here now? After all this time?"

"Come closer," he would say, "I'll tell you...

But she hadn't known how to get closer, how to cross the abyss of death and time that lay between them.

And then, out of nowhere, hope. Sometimes she remembered how it had come to her very clearly, and on those days she would have to hide herself away from Howie, in case he saw the knowledge on her face. Other times-like nowwhen she knew he was in pain, and her heart opened to him the way it had at the beginning, the memory became confounded. Her thoughts lost focus, and she would spend hours staring out of the window, or at the sky, trying to catch hold of some elusive possibility.

No matter, she told herself. It would come back. Meanwhile, she would chop the carrots and wash the dishes and tend the baby and The wind threw a scrap of litter against the window and pinned it there for a moment, flapping like a one-winged bird. Then a second gust carried it away.

She would go soon, with the same ease. That was part of, the promise. She would be carried off, and away, to a place where the secrets her father had almost told her were waiting to be whispered, and her loving enemy would never find her.

Everville rose early that Thursday morning, even though it had gone to bed later than usual the night before. There were banners to hang and windows to polish, grass to be cut, and streets to be swept. No idle hands today.

At the Chamber of Commerce, Dorothy Bullard fretted about the clouds that had blown in overnight. The weatherman had promised sun, sun, sun, and here it was, eleven twenty-two, and so far she'd not seen a glimmer. Masking her anxiety with a beam of her own, she got about the business of the day, organizing the distribution of the Festival brochures, which had arrived that morning, to the list of sites that always carried them. Dorothy was a great believer in lists. Without them, all was chaos.

Just before noon, at the intersection of Whittier and Main, Frank Carlsen ploughed his station wagon into the back of a stationary truck, the collision bringing traffic on Main Street to a virtual halt for the better part of an hour. Carlsen was taken off to the police station, where he admitted to having started celebrating a little early this year; just a few beers to get into the spirit of things. There was no great damage done to the truck, so Ed Olson, who'd brought him in, sent him out again with a simple reprimand. "I'm bending the law for you, Frank," he told Carisen, "so stay sober and don't make me look like an asshole."

Main Street was running freely again by twelve-fifteen, at which time Dorothy looked out of her office window to see that the clouds had started to thin, and the sun was breaking through.