She came in early afternoon. The house smelled scorched, a faint odor of mouse scat and dead flies. She’d slept only a few hours but was restless not tired. She looked in where he lay sleeping on his side, his knees curled up and his hands between his legs like a boy, his bottom lip pouched and slack, a dark spot of drool on the pillow beneath him. She looked at his clothes dropped on the floor and for a moment thought of picking up his trousers to smell the crotch but didn’t. There wasn’t anything she wanted to know. She built a fire and made coffee and then undressed, her clothes stiff and creased with wrinkles, slept in. She took an old shirt of his from the laundry basket and wearing that carried her coffee down to the river. She sat on a boulder and took the shirt off and drank her coffee while her body alternated hot and cool with the clouds sweeping over the sun. Her hands were shaking. It was the coffee she thought.

Her life felt in pieces. Not that she expected otherwise, everything she’d learned tuned her to expect this. But those pieces seemed slight things, fragments too dear or fine to hold. Water ever-passing around the mute boulder shoulder beneath her. She saw herself clearly, in ten years, maybe fifteen, her voice a tailfeather of what it had been, her body grown thick and stout, sitting somewhere, always sitting somewhere, waiting for the night and those few moments when her old self might rise out of her, where again she could stalk some small shabby room, sitting waiting, drinking something. In five years she’d stopped believing in the savior, the one man out there who would hear her and take her to New York or Boston. She was good but not that good. She was good for where she was. And for the time being. Time being, what? Today. Tomorrow if she was lucky. Her mother learned this the hard way. Joey was determined not to find the hard way. The question then was what was the alternative? Trust some man? She spat in the river but didn’t even see her spit land or float or merge. Just gone. Clouds moved off the sun and she was hot. Making the best was what she had. Men could be turned she knew but only for so long. How long she didn’t know, couldn’t say. She didn’t know how an honest wife did it. Perhaps men changed. Perhaps they made accommodations. Perhaps they only learned more contrived elaborate lies. Perhaps they loved their wives and children and went on being men. Perhaps the women even understood it, someway forgave it. She didn’t know. She could see the house across the sheep meadow and through the evergreens. She didn’t know who it was lay there sleeping. The noonday clouds had thickened, the anvils lowered, the towers higher. It would storm by dinnertime. She had an hour, maybe two. She slid down the side of the boulder into the cold water and swam there, fast back and forth against the current, diving down over and over so her whole body was under the surface. She clambered back onto the rock and stood there shivering, the sun out. Herself then as tight and high and young as she ever had been, as she’d ever be again. She stood on the stone to warm but didn’t and finally bent to take up the shirt and carried it up toward the house, walking naked across the pasture and then through the tamaracks, the water drying fast as she went, the stippled flesh still abrupt, erect. Her feet light on the duff.