She did not smile at him but he felt she wanted to. “Don’t ma’am me. Are those his dogs in the car?”

“They’re mine.”

“They going to be all right? With that window up that far? It’s a hot day. They have enough air?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t kill your dogs over some chickens gone off the lay.”

“I wouldn’t. I think they’ll be all right, ma’am.”

She did smile at him this time. As if caught out. Like his father. She said, “Leave them then. Come up to the house and we can sit. There’s questions we all have.”

“I don’t understand much of this.”

She looked at him quick then. Again like his father. She said, “That’s not my fault.”

Prudence crossed over the lawn to meet them and the women led him in through the back entryshed filled with tools on a bench one side of the walkway and room to stack firewood the other side and through a heavy door into the kitchen. They sat with him there, not in the parlor like a guest but around the pineplank kitchen table. Abigail filled glasses of water from a gravity line running into the sink and Prudence set out a plate of lacy-edged molasses cookies that none of them touched although Foster drank off half his water when first it was handed to him. Then he told them without being asked what had happened to his father, adding no conjecture but simply and briefly what was known to have taken place. What seemed to him all that was proper to say. All he was quite sure his father would want him to say. The women sat watching him and he looked from one to the other as he spoke. Prudence it seemed to him was most struck by this news, her face in a constant working tremble. Abigail sat up against the table, her hands flat before her. Several times he saw questions run across her face but she remained silent.

He finished by mentioning the property in New Hampshire, the deed in his name, that his father had left to him. He did not want these women fearing he expected anything from them. He could take care of himself. Then, as means of explaining his presence here, he mentioned again finding the letters from Abigail to his father.

“You knew nothing about us? He never spoke of his family?”

“Abby, wouldn’t of been Jamie to’ve done such a thing.”

“I was asking young Foster here, Sister.”

“He slipped out that door the middle of the night and never once in his life looked back. You know it and so do I. There’s no need to torment the boy.”

“I’m tormenting nothing but your imagination. I was asking a question was all.”

“Actually,” Foster said, “Pop never said anything about family at all. But then I never asked. Although I seem to remember that he didn’t have any family. That they were all dead. Somewhere back in my mind there’s that.”