Evanelle patted his knee. It had been nearly a month since Fred had asked for sanctuary in her home, and he had become an unexpected bright spot to her days. The whole arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but slowly, surely, Fred was moving in. He and Evanelle had spent days going through all her old things in the attic, and Fred seemed to enjoy the stories she told. He was footing the bill to renovate the attic space, and workers with nice posteriors started showing up, which Evanelle enjoyed so much she shoved a chair to the base of the stairs just so she could sit and watch them walk up.

It all had a nice ring of domesticity to it, and Fred would say he knew he deserved better than the way James was treating him. But sometimes, when Evanelle would pass him the butter at dinner, or hand him a hammer to hold while she hung a picture on the wall, he would look at what she’d given him, then look back at her with such expectation that her heart would crack like dry wood for him. Even with all his brave words, he still secretly harbored the belief that one day Evanelle was going to give him something that would make everything all right with James.

“It’s getting late,” Fred said. “People are already putting out blankets. Maybe I missed him.”

Evanelle saw James approach before Fred did. James was a tall, handsome man. He’d always been very thin, the way moody, creative poets with long fingers and soulful eyes were thin in days of old. Evanelle had never had a bad word to say about James. No one did, really. He worked for an investment firm in Hickory and kept to himself. Fred had been his one and only confidant for over thirty years, but suddenly that had changed, and neither Fred nor anyone else in town could figure out why.

But Evanelle had her suspicions. You stick around long enough in this life and you start to understand its ebbs and flows.

There was a type of craziness caused by long-term complacency. All the Burgess women in town, who never had less than six children each, walked around in a fog until their children left home. When their youngest finally left the nest, they always did something crazy, like burn all their respectable high-neck dresses and wear too much perfume. And anyone who had been married for more than a year could testify to the surprise of coming home one day and finding that your husband had torn down a wall to make a room bigger or your wife had dyed her hair just to make you look at her differently. There were midlife crises and hot flashes. There were bad decisions. There were affairs. There was a certain point when sometimes someone said, I’ve just had enough.

Fred went still when he finally saw James approach.