“From the vet, Wilson. Picking her up a day early.” A cat slinks through the opened crack of the barn door and makes his way darkly along the side of the building, pausing there and then darting across the field, a tiny black bolt against the snow.

“Ruth.”

She says nothing.

Wilson fiddles in the silence.

“The strange thing is, she seems fine about it,” Ruth says.

“About what? Who?” His voice is distant, coming from a world of bingo machines and record players.

“About the dog, Wilson. When we got back last night, and then this morning. I’d think she’d be, I don’t know. I expected worse after she disappeared to wherever she did. But she just seems to be taking it so well.”

“Isabelle? Is that necessarily a bad thing?”

Ruth hesitates. “No,” she falters. “I don’t know.” The trees outside bend as one in a gust of wind. Ruth hadn’t noticed any wind until now. She shivers. “It’s cold up here.”

“Mmm.”

“I think a front might be coming through.”

“Mmm.”

She turns around, holding her lips tight around a mouthful of frustration that swells and evaporates almost at once at the sight of her husband on the floor. His cowlick is raised and his eyes are triangled in concentration as he works on the silly old machine before him, the box of other finds away to the side. He sat proudly at the kitchen table this morning, pulling from the box an old bingo machine and a railroad set and a stuffed animal leaking cotton at its seams, and then, after his mother took Isabelle out to the barn, he led Ruth upstairs to show her the best of his finds, an old phonograph player, which with a little work, he has said, will be good as new, and wouldn’t it be just the sort of thing that Isabelle would love for Christmas?

Wilson feels her gaze and looks up; against the bright background of white snow, white sky out the window behind her, she is mostly silhouette, her face and body dark. “What?” he says.

She sighs. “Nothing,” she says. “I just wish you’d focus.”

“I’m trying to,” he says, unfastening the tone arm from its hinge.

“Not on the phonograph machine.”