Marie was very quiet in the house. There had been no sound since the irritated clank of the mustard knife. She must be taking down her graying hair in the bathroom, smoothing Pond’s cream on her tired face. He tried to remember how long it had been since they had shared a room at night. Ten years at least. When their son left she had taken his room, moving his books and his old guitar into the garage. She listed her reasons: Jack snored. He ate onions at night and smelled of them. He stole the covers; even when they used separate blankets, he stole hers. He woke her when he got up at five. She couldn’t function without her sleep and God knew they needed her income, she said. Jack took to brushing his teeth more, and the separate blankets were his idea, but he didn’t push the issue. Sleep didn’t have to be sex, his son once told him when Jack found a yellow-haired girl in Michael’s bed one morning, the two kids tangled in sheets. Sleep didn’t have to be sex. As if they really had only been sleeping there, the girl bare-shouldered, her clothes and Michael’s in a heap at the foot of the bed. Jack had joked about it with Marie. Then Marie, when she moved out of his bedroom, said sex didn’t have to be sleep.

Jack lifted his legs and dropped them on the stair, hoping the thud would be louder than it was, unable to move his feet or hands, still trying to slow his breathing down.

He called his wife’s name. She didn’t have to rescue him; he just wanted her close. He regretted all their suspicions: hers not always unfounded, his not easily dismissed. All the time she spent at work, all the nights she came home late. The cops called her out in the middle of the night to interview criminals, and he had wondered about those men: some of them Cree like her grandmother, off the Rocky Boy reservation, some of them violent white boys with no place to go. He wondered what they made of her, coming to them in their dark hours. The sheriff and his young deputy watched through an open door because Havre had no two-way mirror, and Jack wondered about them, too, watching his handsome wife, her long fingers folded in front of her, her black hair tied back, the serious look on her face when she listened.

“Your wife is something else,” the sheriff had said to him, lighting up a cigarette outside the state liquor store, watched by his own quiet wife.