They rode east less than an hour and left the Portland train in Littleton, New Hampshire, the train filled with families and groups traveling on into the White Mountains on holiday excursions. It was only drummers and salesmen and local people returning home who got off with them at the depot, the town west enough from the mountains to miss the splendor and air of the resorts just miles to the east. Instead there were mills and tanning sheds and leatherworks and shoe factories spread along the Ammonoosuc River that ran out of the mountains. They ignored the trolleys and trudged east from Main Street and followed the bow of the river past the leather sheds and found a cheap rooming house where the woman looked from Joey to Jamie and back again, her eyes bright with contempt for both but her wash-scalded red hand took his money paid out for a week.

Mornings he went out and bought hard rolls at a bakery and meat and cheese from a butcher and brought them back to the room where they had breakfast and then she made a sandwich and wrapped it up in the bag from the bakery and he stuck it in his pocket and walked to the depot to catch the train. This way he spent his days in Bethlehem and Twin Mountain and Fabyan and Bretton Woods and Crawford and Franconia, making his way around the high-storied white-colonnaded hotels, each one a thing imperial, seeming to him as magnificent and self-contained as ships upon the calm waters of tended sweeps of lawn, all overhung with the mountains close, upswept, delineated in the rarefied sharp-edged air. He studied the men playing golf and lingered near the tennis courts where men and women both played on the packed red clay surfaces. He made his way to the rear buildings and there talked with men in the stables and dairies and women working in the laundries and kitchen and dining room workers on breaks. He was offered work and each time he turned it down. He decided they had come to a very good place.

Late afternoons when he returned to the room she would be silent, angry, impatient as her face slowly lightened down the shades from purple black to reds and yellows over the days, as her skin transformed slowly back to its own tone, with only the impressions of watery proud-flesh around her eye, and the broken vessels of her nose healed and the small crusts appearing daily around the flanges of her nostrils grew smaller and then fell away altogether. And after the first day he learned to wait to tell her of his journeying. In the long summer evenings she would brush out her hair and with it loose and wild around her face they would go out to find someplace to eat. Sit silent eating the rough good food as around them men whose arms and faces were stained the color of walnut sat eating and speaking low to one another in a patois of French and English, a smell rising from them that was not death or putrescence but a mixture of lye and tannin and the sharp tang of some chemical compound—not so much the smell of dead cow or the waxen gleam of calf-leather but rather some crude shadow of the creature in between. And from time to time he’d look across to her and see her head tilted a way that made clear she was listening and following the jabber beside them. And he did not ask what she heard. They did not eat two nights in a row at the same place.