He stood up from the table and walked barefoot across the room past her to where a screened door let out onto the back of the house. Stood there and lighted a cigarette. The smoke broke through the screen and curled away. The rain cistern was out by the back small ell of the house. Past that just sweeps of dunes braided with the air flowing through the beachgrass. Late-afternoon light. With his shoes off, his pantcuffs scuffed the floor. He stood there by the door and finished his smoke and tipped open the door enough to flip the butt out onto the sand. Then turned. She was still at the table, her back to him. She hadn’t moved. Her shoulders and neck and head were stiffly held. He wondered if she expected him to strike her. He walked back to the side of the table and looked down at her and said, “I guess that’s the complication you spoke of.”

She looked up at him. Her face in pieces, as if he couldn’t bring all her parts together in his eyes. Or all those parts stricken and fierce at once on their own, independent of him. She said, “I didn’t ask you to come rescue me.”

“Is that right?”

Then those pieces all were one. If that was him or her he could not say. Then knew it was her. She said, “That is right. I don’t need you to raise up a child. I’ve seen it done alone firsthand and know it can be done. And I know what it takes, what it costs. And you do too I guess. I’m not talking about me here. All I know about me is what it takes is what I’ll do. But I’m thinking about how it was for me as a child and how it was for you. One of us the mother gone, the other the father. I’m not saying we turned out wrong—truth is I think we’re both pretty smart because of it. But it’s a smart we had to fill out as we went along, a smart to make up for something not there to start with. And I’m thinking maybe we could avoid that, this time along. I’m thinking, we wanted, we could do some good together.”

“Jesus shit,” he said.

As if life just disguised as a woman had sat up and told him that a structure is in place before you even begin to think and it reveals itself not when you want it to or think you’ve keyed it but when it wants to, capricious. And for no good reason thought of the brand new Ford motorcar maybe a mile up the beach in the dunes and was ashamed of it. As if it were everything wrong with him drawn up into one machine.