After eating they’d walk slowly back to their rooming house through the bat-slung dusk where they would sit on the bed and smoke his cigarettes, both of them barefooted, and he would tell her of his day, of what he’d seen and where. Of what they might do and where when she was ready, and he held nothing out as absolute as if he was not the maker of plans but a simple scout for her authority. And as he talked he would always find the point to reach to her and begin to make his way through her clothes, still talking and she still listening, and sometime after this her hands would come over to him until they were both naked in the settling dusk when the words would stop, sometimes petering out as if a trail lost and other times clamped away with speed and violence.

Later, in full dark, they would lie side by side on their stomachs with their heads lifted up to the window and one’s hand laid smooth on the sweat-slick bowl of the small of the other’s back. One would smoke and hold the cigarette to the other’s mouth. The air already cool enough to chill delicious their sweat. And it was then she talked to him.

She could not remember her father. There had been a photograph so she knew what he’d looked like and she recalled sensations that matched the figure in the image: great roughened hands that enwrapped her body, the coarse bristle of his mustache, huge shoes, a shadow over the grass. She remembered being lifted and tossed up above his head while he stood, his hands up to catch and toss her again, over and over: Quebec. She remembered the trees on the lawn of the place in Saint-Camille and the bright whiteness of the house and the sailing summer clouds, all these things as she was thrown wild into the sky; but she could not, in her memory, make herself look down at that face looking up to watch her. All she remembered was the trees and the house and the sky. And not even the hands that caught her, only the moment of safety those hands made before they freed her again into the air. Marc LeBaron. “I got my mother’s hair,” she told Jamie. “His was blond, that thick blond hair that falls in waves not single strands.”

That next winter one hundred and twenty miles south a winch cable snapped in the Millstone Hill quarry and he was crushed by a four-ton block of granite being lifted to be worked into elegant monuments for other men. She did not recall the telegraph arriving but an afternoon dark from the early winter twilight when a neighbor woman bathed her in a washtub in the kitchen while her grandparents and uncles and aunts sat in the small parlor with the heavy curtains drawn and a lamp lighted, the only sounds the drawn raw wails that would rise from time to time from the bolted room upstairs where her mother had been for a day. Those sounds became the death of her father and the twilight colors on the snow her memory of him.