In the kitchen Abigail sat in a robe with her hair bound up in a towel long after the conversation in the next room had ended and her sister had gone back up the stairs. Sat with her hair dried and knotted within the towel. Sat with the words of her father, not just the story, only parts of which were new to her, but his reaction to it all. His anger of life. As if she’d found a poem of a dozen lines that cast calm over turbulence, that made succinct the indistinct. As if a puzzle had been laid together before her and she was not surprised by the picture made, had even expected the picture, but was surprised by the hands doing the work. And understood those words to be part of a continuum for her own life, an understanding of how things are. Knew the acuteness of her own details were the only measure of herself she’d ever have. If it was a bitter rind, that was fine; she wanted it all.

She waited long enough for her father to have followed her sister upstairs to his own bed if that was what he was after and when he did not go she waited some while longer in a courtesy she’d never before felt or needed to feel for him and then rose and shook out her hair and laid the towel over the rack by the range to finish drying and went to him, went bearing the one tale she had that she’d share with him, the one splice that overlaid their lives. And came into the living room where the lamp had guttered so he lay slumped down sleeping in the armchair in a sooted light, his mouth slack and open, his face collapsed with fatigue, his broken knotted hands resting on the arm grips of the chair as if laid there by someone other than him. And she stood watching him sleep only a short time before she went to the chest behind the sofa and took out a woolen Johnson blanket and spread it over him, slipping it up against his throat and using the edge to wipe the bead of drool from the cleft of his chin. Then she cupped the chimney and blew out the lamp and went up the dark house to her own bed in the room where she kept the floor grate closed year round and the window open to sleep. Some mornings there would be a fine peak of blown snow on the sill or the floor beneath it. This night there was no snow, just the thin starlight of early winter with no moon. She lay on her side with a pillow between her thighs and both arms up under the pillow beneath her head. From here she could see the upper sheep pastures and the hillside woodlot cresting up against the few stars. She lay a long time without sleeping.