“I guess I pretty much already did.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of you.”

“All right,” she said. “So you want me to answer? You want the truth?”

“I believe I do.”

“Up home. This summer. He wanted me bad. And he talked such a clean honest idea of what he could do for me. It wasn’t like most fools. So the truth is that if it had come down to it I would have. But most men, most all their lives except maybe once or twice it’s only the one thing they want and then they lose interest in anything else. And I wanted what he was holding out. So I made him wait. And I was right about him. If things had turned out different who can say? But they turned out the way they are. And here I am. Your short answer is no but I would’ve if I’d had to, if it’d come to that. You live with that?”

He was silent. The twilight had gone all slate. He looked away from her, around the confines of the porch as if at floor level he’d discover something sought. Then he looked back at her. “You’re going to have a baby.”

“It looks that way.”

“My baby.”

“Both of ours.”

“What do you know about babies? I don’t know anything about them. Never been around one much now I think about it.”

She grinned at him then. “I never was either. I guess you just have it and then one thing comes after another.”

“Seems there’s more to it than that.”

“I guess there likely is.”

They were quiet then. It was near to full dark. A piece of moon hung out over the water, making light there and throwing a pale thin gray light into the porch. The wind had fallen off and it was not as cold, the air heavy as if charged or someway filled by the presence of endless ocean. After a time he spoke. “So you want to come home?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

He stood then, coming up smoothly but he did not come to her, turning to stand instead at the screened side of the porch, his back to her. He stayed like that some time. No longer shivering. Finally he turned. She had not been waiting for him but watching him, knowing he was sifting and sorting, allowing all things to align within him—she sure his answer was known sometime before to him as well as her. He said, “It’s awful pretty, isn’t it? The times I imagined the ocean wasn’t ever anything like this. I guess you couldn’t imagine a thing like this, not really. You think?”

“Not until I saw it I couldn’t.”