“Goddammit, Norman. I meant to do a good thing when I brought him home. Not just for you three here but for him too. I didn’t want more hurt onto him than he’s already had.”

He nodded. Then he stepped up to the buggy side. Steam was coming off the horses in the cold. He reached a hand and placed it on top of her gloves holding the reins in a tight bunch. He said, “Lately, I’ve come to believe we can’t know which will end up as which when we do it. All we can do is try. That’s all we get.”

“You’re entitled to it but that’s a terribly sad view of things.”

He took his hand away and nodded. “The view from here.”

“I wish I could tell you it’ll get better.”

“Oh,” he said, “maybe that’s the saddest part. I know it will.”

Now she reached and touched him, her hand on his shoulder, laid onto him a long moment before she took it away. He looked off to study the sky. She said, “I so wish I could help someway.”

“There’s no help.”

“You’ll see,” she said. “You’re too much a man to stay like this.”

He looked at her now. Her anger so clear, contained, poured onto him. The great endless anger of love. He smiled at her. “That’s half the problem right there. Being a man. I don’t even know what it means anymore.”

She kept her eyes on him until he looked away. Then she chirped up her team and swung the buggy around and went out of the farmyard and down the track. He watched her go. Before she reached the hillcrest one gloved hand came out of the buggy to wave at him. Crooked at the wrist like a bat in the gray air. He knew she would do this. He knew she’d know he’d be watching. He waited until she was out of sight and then turned to the house.

So Abigail waited with her story. She felt no urgency, was almost languid with it, as if emerging into a deep and true calm as to a condition essential to her nature. Took the boy inside and cleaned his face and packed it with last year’s remnant ice and slowly allowed him to tell his story, the same old story just fresh and bright with pain and realization for him, listened to this and soothed him as best she could. And then sat and listened to her father try and do the same thing, the rough texture of his tenderness making the one low flare of burn in her that she could almost see, a dim knot of washed-out orange sputtering in endless neutral darkness. Something that if she could reach she would lift up and set away from her, the hands that might do that reaching thick with scar tissue, impervious to the dilute caustic acid of it. And instead rose up and began to put supper together over the stove, simple fried potatoes with onions and bacon, tomatoes stewed and put up by herself and her mother the summer past. And Prudence home then from school and so the whole thing over again with its new variations and then the three left for the barn, the evening chores, and left her alone with the supper. And if she was not happy she felt herself well past sadness. She was an engine, stilled but not stalled, running a long track that looped over itself again and again, circling always back to herself because it was the only where to run. She alone owned her life and was not cold to it; it did not matter how others saw her.