He did not see her for three days. He did not seek her out. Wherever she was she had new clothes. It was the only thing he could say for sure. He spent time in the office behind the bar in the Sinclair and went over everything so the business could run on its own until the end of October or burn down before then, he did not care. He attended to his liquor business. On the third day he left work early in the afternoon and drove the long slow thirty miles north to a lumber camp up near the Connecticut Lakes where there was a man who owed Wells and Terry money that they owed to him. It was not a thing he had to do. They were competent in collections. The man was a Frenchman cook at the camp and Jamie asked for him by name and stood out in the sawdust-strewn yard with the hot summer sun against his back, his shoulders strained already as he called the man out of the long low cookhouse, a big man but fat and soft with a face puffed and red from his ovens, his thumbs up in his red suspenders over his naked sweating chest. Jamie stepped forward and explained why he was there in a simple declarative sentence as he stooped and came up with a broken canthook handle that he laid across the face of the man and as the blood blew forth from the Frenchman’s nose and as he came forward and down Jamie stepped back and brought the handle deep into the Frenchman’s belly and the man crumpled onto the ground and Jamie left him there. Driving the miles back as afternoon turned down to evening he stopped the car and was sick. He hadn’t eaten in days. He could sit in his office behind the bar and order a full meal off the dining room menu and some girl would bring it back to him. He wanted oysters. A salad. Some roasted joint. Potatoes. The small puffed steaming rolls. Butter. Pie.

The fourth day he was up early, midmorning. All he was doing was going to work, coming home, not staying up. He wanted to see no one. Whatever was being talked of had not reached him and he understood this absence of gossip as a gauge of the problem. He had been a very small boy last he wanted to cry. Take her by the shoulders and shake her until her head lolled and her eyes turned up. He built a fire and waited and threw a handful of grounds into the boiling water and set it aside to settle. There wasn’t anything to eat in the house not spoiled. He wasn’t hungry. He burned his hand pouring coffee into the small cracked cup with the wild roses running just below the rim that she always drank from. Drank it burning and puked in the sink on top of a pile of crusted crockery. As if his stomach wanted out.