“I’m sure he was,” she told him. And again turned her head and cried back into the house, “Abigail!” A beat for each syllable and coming down hard on the last so that it sounded to Foster like two small preludes and a final hard chord. Prudence looked back at him and said, “He was tender, your father was. Always. But he never found a way to allow that part of him. Not that I knew. Now you’re telling me he did.” Her face working like some clockwork lay behind it, the works of sorrow as she spoke. “I expect you’re right. You knew him much after I ever did.”

Foster did not know he knew this until he said it. “I think all he ever wanted was to make things right. And maybe he didn’t know how to do that. Or maybe he just had bad luck. But what I remember was that he tried.”

As he said this he heard the tread of someone coming down the hall behind Prudence. He rocked forward to see past the splintered sunlight who it was. And Prudence seemed to rise a little as if alerted but was also bent sideways, craning past him, and then her hands flew up and she cried out. “Is that your dog after the chickens? Boy? Foster? Look there.”

Glow had gone out the open window of the car and was stalking the length of wire runs off the side of the barn, stepping forward slowly, each step a cautious trembling motion, pausing to lock on point at the birds, so huge to her, so close—nothing she’d ever seen before. The young dog silent with her stalk. The chickens in mild hysteria, gabbling their alarm and outrage. Roosters swaying nervously between the hens and the wire. Lovey sat upright in the driver seat, watching her daughter, ears lifted. She already knew about chickens.

Foster went down across the lawn and passed the car, telling Lovey to stay, only to say something, to infer some authority upon the situation, and went over quickly but smoothly to come up behind where Glow was frozen, shivering, only her head moving in faint clicks as her eyes passed from bird to bird and back again, trying to keep them all under the pin of her gaze. Hundreds of chickens. He ran his hands over her sides, telling her to whoa, and took her by the collar and pried her around in a half-circle until she faced away from the birds and then he squatted by her and stroked her nose as she kept trying to turn her head back to the birds and he spoke to her in a soft voice, telling her no no no.