“Do you?”

“Uh-huh.”

Now over the western ridge was a single high anvil of cumulus, blown there by winds far beyond their knowing, the edges of the cloud scalloped black with the body swollen like a dozen lumped breasts. He said, “Times, I wish I’d done that. Wrote things down. But then I wonder if the words would get in the way of the memory, replace the memory. But of course memory’s nothing but what some part of you chooses. The problem with you and me, people like us, is we want to hold on to it all. We can’t let none of it go. But it goes on and goes, all the same.”

She was quiet and then said, “Oh. You’re a melancholy man today.”

He waited also but less time than she had and he said, “I’ve always been that way.”

“I think it’s a terrible way to be.”

“I guess maybe so. But it’s the only way I know.”

They were sitting to supper in that same evening dusk turned cool when the muted polyphony of wheels and hooves came clear as a vehicle crested the hill into the farm. Norman heard it first and stood to the window and then the boy was beside him, grasping the window ledge to bounce up and down as his father peered down at the hotel livery approaching, struck still with the apparition of some news, a telegram, something vivid, worse than he could know. So he could not see what was simply there. Behind him he felt the weight of the girls at the table watching him, both held torpid with their own sense of disaster. Only Jamie was free then to cry out, “It’s Mama. Mama’s back!”

She would not speak of her trip and stopped the clamor with firmness. “I’m back; that’s all. Don’t pester me.” She sat to eat a small plate of the fresh potatoes and a single slice of cob-smoked ham and Norman saw she was near trembling, each motion slightly adrift with tremor. She would not meet his eyes but once, this a chilled beseeching for solitude. She watched her plate, working knife and fork constantly to carve and maneuver the food into slight portions that from time to time she’d lift to her mouth. She told nothing and asked no questions and the room fell silent around her it seemed without her noticing but as if the silence extended out from her. Only at the end of the meal did she take the small boy briefly between her knees to press him against her and stroke his head and then her hands fell easily off him when Abby came forward to take him up for his story and bed. Prudence began to wash up after the meal and Norman rose from the table as was his custom, going to the parlor to smoke, and, standing, looked to Leah, expecting she would rise also. She sat at the table, her eyes still on the cloth before her, her hands lying on their sides on the table, thumbs and fingers forming crude cups, as if dropped there. He stood looking down at her. Her clothes were smeared with dust, ill-fitting with travel, slumped upon her. She did not look up at him. At the sink, Pru worked quickly, very quietly, her back straight with tension. She washed and rinsed and left all in the drainboard, not drying with a cloth to place things away in the cupboards and drawers but left them to air dry and rinsed her hands under the gravity line and left the room, her eyes scanning her mother and father both in one swift roll. Norman stood a moment more, the sound of the door closing a stubborn sigh in the kitchen, as if the air there were inhaled and held. Then he sat at the table again, took out pipe and pouch, filled the briar and smoked. Waited.