When he and Prudence had come from the barn to the house it was empty and quiet, Abigail gone from sight. The supper dishes finished, stacked in the drain to dry. Prudence had told him, “She’s disturbed by all this. The news of your father. You. Everything.”

Foster had nodded, studying the old woman telling him this. He said, “Me too.”

She’d stood then, silent and awkward, looking at him. Then said, “It shouldn’t have to be like this. I’d do anything for it to be different.”

He could not say, now, sitting in the dark, which of them had moved. It seemed that neither had crossed those few feet between them. But he was leaning over this woman, this sister of his father, his face buried down in the headcloth wrapped over her springing hair, her arms around him holding him as if she’d been waiting all her life to do so. His own hands running up and down the span of her back, the hard muscles there under the thin housedress she wore. Both rocking. The smell of her. Woodsmoke. The sweet savor of animal, dung, bedding, milk, hay-must; the odors of cooking; the faint sour smell of old body, and underneath this a light floral scent as of a soap used long ago, perhaps, he thought, only this morning. Keening for his own lost mother and everything else lost. But for that moment mostly her. And understood the old woman against him was doing the same for a different mother. He held her tightly.

In the three weeks since his father died he’d been numb-walking, wild with grief at night, sleeping short dense hours before rising up into another day of the familiar grown strange. Now he sat in bed and knew he’d passed into another life altogether, where he’d look back upon the years in the White Mountains as the simpleminded innocence of a child. And knew his father was not dead, truly; he would haunt him forever— the man unknown, never knowable. What he told Abigail was only partial truth: he would not simply be adding to what he already knew, but fighting also each new fact along the way to hold intact the laughing ease of his father, the clear sense of the man he’d had until this day.

He sat in the bed, stiff against the old high headboard, wide awake. Breathing in the smell of the house. As if to add to the memory of his father. He slid down and lay flat on the mattress. Certain he would not sleep that night. He thought briefly of his dogs. Then did not fall asleep so much as pass into unconsciousness as if the day had struck him senseless.