He sat back in the chair, turned his feet out from the table and crossed one knee over the other, his sock-foot dangling. Again he thought of the wild horse, the way when touched the muscle under the hide would ripple, the sensation of being able to touch fear. He said, “Why, nothing. I can see you’re wore down. You don’t have to tell me about it. Not now, not anytime, you don’t care to. I’m glad you’re back is all. Safe and sound.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “why you should be.”

She slept thirty hours and the rest tiptoed as if the house held sickness. At half past four Sunday morning she rose and dressed in the near-dark. Norman woke also and lay silent watching her, a dim figure against the predawn panes. It was cold in the room and he thought Frost on the Hubbards to sweeten the meat. If there’d been lamplight he’d have seen his breath. He lay watching her assemble clothing from out of drawers and draw it on and this familiar everyday reassured him. He considered speaking to her but something in the way she stood before the window made him not: nothing so clear as an attempt on her part for stealth but more complicated, as if she drew clothing onto her with a focused distraction he felt more than saw. He lay in the bed not as if sleeping, knowing not to hope to fool her, but as if sleep lay still heavy over him. Once she was gone from the room he listened to her tread in the hall and on the stairs and then rolled onto his back, fully awake. He heard her in the kitchen, could smell woodsmoke as the range came up to life and sometime after that began to feel the creep of warmth. Then, as the panes boldened to stippled dawn and he was just short of rising, heard the backdoor clap lightly shut, the sound of a held-back door eased to. He guessed she was out to the barns and stood then from the bed, feeling all was well, was sliding back to old ways and counts and he dressed simply in wool trousers with a checked shirt drawn down into them, his braces snug and tight over his shoulders as if affirming the rightness and roundness of the world.

There were four loafpans of bread rising on the counter and she was not in the still-dark barns. From there, as the day came on, he saw the clear trail breaking the frost on the meadow grass above the house leading up into the woods. She had gone for a walk, was all. He went back to the house and ate a meal of bacon and biscuit, a thing learned from her. He drank a single cup of coffee; years recent his bowels could not stand more. He smoked his pipe and went to the outhouse and resolved again to consider indoor plumbing. He waited for his children to rise on their weekly lazy morning and waited for his wife. He sat reading the days-old paper, sitting in the parlor to have no view of the hillside, not wanting to watch for her.