They’d rise midafternoon long after the morning fog burned away and the sun was beating through the hemlock and tamarack stand surrounding the house, the air still and resinous of soft-needled duff, waking slow with the dawn blankets thrown off and the sheet twisted to a rope between their legs, slick and slow with sleep. Green-backed flies beat against the screens and thrummed against the ceiling, the song of afternoon. One or the other of them would make coffee and they’d carry this, wearing only robes with towels slung over their shoulders, out through the redolent canopied evergreens where chipmunks trilled at them, into the sheep-shorn pasture with ledges of clamshell-colored boulders thrust up in the full bake of the afternoon, down the worn path to the Ammonoosuc. They sat on flat-topped boulders the size of boats and drank the coffee and then swam in the hole made by the riverbend, the water in July or August a cold shriek that shrank his scrotum and lifted her nipples and gooseflesh laid over them. Awake, hangovers gone with the current, they’d stretch on the boulders’ backs with eyes closed and hands under their heads to doze and brown in the sun, the quavering myriad river-tongues cleanly filling their minds with nothing beyond precisely and minutely where they were. Sometime later while the northern summer sun was still distinct but the folds of the riverbank had gained slight shadow they would go back up to the house and there bathe and shave and dress for the night, eat a breakfast of eggs and toasted bread and she would drink a cup of tea with honey and lemon laced with whiskey and he’d take a small fruit-juice glass of the whiskey neat. Then in the long lovely twilight they’d drive the three miles west into Bethlehem and he’d drop her off at the Casino on the grounds of the Maplewood and then continue a mile farther west to the Sinclair where he began his night, a shift of five hours managing the lounge there, hiring and firing and taking inventory and stopping left and right all throughout that time to make fine kind relaxed talk with anyone not in his employ who happened upon him. Around midnight he’d leave there to run up and down the long main street and the few short sidestreets where there was reason to go, pulling up to backdoors in the thick shadows of summer night and making deliveries from the backseat and trunk of his automobile. Sometime between two and three in the morning he’d go from where he finished to the illicit after-hours club on Swazey Lane where most nights Joey would already be before him, sitting on a stool on the small raised platform beside the piano player, no longer having to work the room or pose and stretch but able now to just sit with her knees together and sing, the room swathed in layers of smoke and blue from the low lights and the people allowed in would be content with their stupor and fatigue merely to sit and listen to her. Here Jamie did not work so much as make contact: a man easing up to him and while maybe looking away mention the name of the place or the name of a man met in the place and the threads of a deal would be laid. Jamie never agreed to anything. All things were tentative, not even so much as implied. He’d listen and at most nod his head, not in complicity but simply as if indicating he’d heard what was being said or asked. Then he’d go away and think about it, or not think about it but let it settle within him and a few days later he’d know if it was right or not. He made no promises, except to himself. And those had nothing to do with greed. Mostly he sat back in a far corner and watched her sing and sipped whiskey and waited. When she took breaks he’d join her outside to smoke and breathe in the night, not even really speaking but in short bursts of coded language, fragments of speech. Other times he’d stay seated, seeing she was at work, crooning to someone, leaning forward off her stool, her eyes without distraction, milking the one ripe fruit in the room about to fall. Then he’d leave her be. He trusted her. He’d learned he had to. She drew money from men the same way he filled the hole in them; it was what they wanted. It was not that he thought people were stupid about love or whiskey or sex. It was that he knew all men were tigered. Each had the chink, the soft spot. The only ones he liked were the ones it was hard to find. He’d not yet met a man where it wasn’t there. The thought of that was the one thing he feared. Finally there would come a time when the piano player didn’t return to the keys and the room was empty but for the two or three unwilling to go and Joey would be slumped with her arms spread around her drink on the table and the sound of birdsong from the lilacs and elms and rosebushes outside would break through into the basement and he’d reach and touch her arm and he’d say “Home” and she’d nod. This was summer.