She hadn’t said anything, just watched him disappear beneath the floorboards. And she wasn’t angry, then or now. She was past that, back to where she started, which was dumbfounded, really, still blinking in amazement at just how far Chick was taking all this. It had started out barely three years ago as a few night courses to “quench his thirst.” One of them was labor history, and he began to learn more about that dreary mill town of his youth—Lawrence, Massachusetts—and the role its textile workers had played in the making of the unions. He would come home after class, his cheeks flushed with enthusiasm, and he’d pace the floor and recite some new historical fact. Sometimes Allie was still up when he came in, and he would speak a little slower, and clearer, already sharing and teaching what he knew. And when he began to study Marxist theory, he became even more animated, sometimes still talking in bed after Tess had turned off the light.

“You see? The more screwed over a group of people get, the more they realize just how they’re getting it and who’s doing it and that’s when they realize they’re all in it together: class consciousness. That’s the first step, hon. Isn’t this guy beautiful?”

“You’re beautiful.” And soon she would be sliding beneath him and he would thrust as fast and wild as a boy, as if perhaps she herself carried the answer to all things inside her.

And she meant it; he was beautiful, this Chick Donovan whom she had met eighteen years ago at a party at her sister’s house in Andover. He was Patty’s boyfriend’s friend, a boxer, so Theresa had expected a thug, not the thin boy in the baggy chinos and flannel shirt who looked like Robert Taylor and kept his eyes down whenever she spoke to him. One night out he drove her to Salisbury Beach and they went on the roller coaster. On the first and steepest rise, he put both arms over his head and kept them there until the final, jerking curve of the ride, a strangely satisfied smile on his wind-chapped face. Later, they sat on the sand against the creosote stilts under Lena’s Dance Club and drank beer out of bottles. The moon was low over the ocean. He told her then that he had a sea of respect for his father but he didn’t want to be at all like him, punching a time card down at Malden Mills, working for a man he’ll never meet. When she asked him if he was thinking of college, he laughed.

“Nope, it’s the trades for me. Then I can take you around the world, if you want.”

And that was his calling for a while it seemed, after they were married: travel. When he began building for himself, they followed the work: Triangle, West Virginia; Temple, Texas; Salinas, California, where she delivered Allie; Tacoma, Washington; LeRoy, New York; Kittery, Maine; and now Heywood, Massachusetts, where Christopher was born. Chick had his sights on Jackson, Mississippi, next, and that one had come out of the blue. It wasn’t even in the form of a question.