He didn’t go home. He didn’t go looking for her. When the lounge closed at half past two he fired up the Ford and drove over the hill to Franconia and out to the Notch where he found a waitress at the Profile House just getting off work. Together they went the couple of miles north to Echo Lake, where they sat on the sand beach and drank from the bonded bottle he’d lifted from behind the bar and lay back and watched the stars wheel up in the slender wedge of sky between the narrow cleft of mountains and talked about how men and women couldn’t seem to help but do each other wrong and how things should be. Later, when it was too cold to do it, they stripped off their clothes and swam briefly in the lake. When they came out of the water he lifted her and carried her to the picnic table and set her down facing him and took her ankles in his hands and spread her legs and with her saying no he entered her and stood thrusting with his face turned up to the sky and when her arms and legs locked around him and her voice changed from words to other sounds it did not matter. He lifted both hands to cup her head to him and called her darling and sweetheart and love and then came in her, she rising off the table as he came. His hands hooked her buttocks and he carried her around the beach, the soft sand slopping and grasping at his feet. Some nightbird called out from across the lake. A fox barked up in the hills. The stars were still. A lightened sky in the east. Pale, almost no color at all. He stood and watched the girl dress. She was clumsy in the sand, standing on one foot and then the other. He smoked a cigarette. She was slow and he was cold.

Joey was not at the house. It was past dawn and the sun had been out as he came over the hill between Franconia and Bethlehem after taking the girl—Alice was her name—back to the dormitories behind the Profile House. She’d been teary and he was too tired to do more than drive the car. He just wanted to be rid of her. It was nothing to cry over. Before he dropped her off he held her a moment, patting her shoulder, wondering if anyone he knew was spying him out. Then he drove over the hill with the low-spread sun an angled pain running through his eyes to the back of his head. Out of Bethlehem down toward the river he drove into the dense river fog and it wrapped around him like a bandage. And Joey was not there. He’d been prepared to find her sleeping or even sitting up, still dressed from the night, eyes red-shot and her face choked with anger. He stood in the kitchen. The dishes from their breakfast the evening before still in the sink. There was no sign she’d been there and yet he felt she had come and gone. He went through the house and it seemed everything was there as it should be. The only things gone were what she’d taken last night. Too tired to make a fire, he poured day-old cold coffee into a cup and filled it to the brim with whiskey and sat on the small front steps and listened to the fog drip from the trees. His neck ached as if it had been beaten with an iron rod. He finished his drink and went into the house and stripped and washed himself with a cloth and cold water from a basin. His fingers smelled of sex and tobacco, the soap only a thin layer of perfume over the deeper scents, as if those smells were coming from within his skin. He went to bed.