The wet boot was a discomfort, but not the worst thing that could have happened. The loss of the great, smooth block could be sustained. The unsteady wheelbarrow kissed the bank where he had left the tin cart. In the cart was a bag of the sawdust they had given him at the old mill, when the mill was there, and he packed it around the blocks in the cart to keep the ice from melting. A light snow fell, settling on his shoulders and the surface of the pond. The cart called for a different skill in stacking, as it was narrower than the wheelbarrow and had deeper walls and a lip at the top, but the arrangement of the blocks held the same absorption for him, in the fitting together. It was work, but it made him feel at ease.

The cart took two loads, but he couldn’t do another today, not with a wet foot. He hid the empty wheelbarrow in the bushes and picked up the handle-end of the cart. It was lighter than usual, but still heavy, and well stacked. He rolled it up the bank, toward the place where the old dirt road had been twenty years ago, before they blasted the tunnel in the hillside and paved a shorter road from town. He left, with each pair of steps, one wet leather-soled footprint that cut through the light snow to the ground, and one dry that tamped down a white outline of itself.

The family with the Viking refrigerator with the brushed-steel doors finished skating, and studied the footprints the man had left behind: one dark, one light. The prints, separated by a narrow wheel track, continued into the trees and saplings that grew in the abandoned roadbed. The children asked why—why the different footprints, why the old road, where it went. Their father, who usually had an explanation for everything, had none at all. He lifted his smallest boy to his shoulders in place of an answer, taking the boy’s skates and his hockey stick in his hands. Other skaters followed them and went home to lunch, to warm, lighted kitchens and all the things they kept cold.

A STAKES HORSE

IT WAS EIGHTY-SOMETHING and dust-dry the first weekend of the state fair in Great Falls, and my father and I were at the races, as usual. We’d spent half the summer weekends of my life at dusty tracks, in dusty towns. I came from checking on the horses to find my father under a shade tarp at a picnic table, a straw hat covering his bald head. He looked tired.

“Take your drugs?” I asked.

He glared at me over his wire-rimmed dark glasses, and put a freckled hand down flat on the table. “Addy,” he said.