Both quiet then. She was so lovely. He thought This is how it is, with all of them. Someway. His father and mother. His grandfather and grandmother. Even all skewed and twisted the old man in the house pale clean scent of her skin, her wet clothes. Her head laid sideways against his chest, her face turned down so he saw the crown of her head, the split-through to her scalp where her hair fell apart, the delicate rib of the back of her ear, the smooth swelling column of her neck going into the collar of the shirt. And when he stopped crying he still stood holding her, held her until they were both silent and still and he could feel her life against him, the beating of her heart. And stepped away when he felt himself begin to rise against her.

“Oh boy,” he said, turning from her, “am I ever fucked up.” And he took the box of his father’s stale cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and lighted one and squatted in the rain at the open door of the cabin. And then, as if released, the two dogs came off the bed and went out the door into the rain, tracking again through the yard. He squatted there smoking, watching the dogs. The smoke came off in slow wrought spirals that held out in the rain before breaking apart. Behind him he heard her sit once again on the bed, the faint clicking sound as the tick settled.

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know.” He did not look back at her.

“Back north?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I don’t think so. Not right off.” Thinking of the house in Bethlehem, the two old women on the Vermont farm. Them he would need to send some kind of word to. Some letter. Without any idea what he would say. Get away from here first, he thought. Then write something simple, painless, fill it up with his love of them, whatever it was he would finally be doing.

Behind him she said, “Take me with you.”

Where the rain ran off the shake roof there was a line of beading streams that were trenching pods into the earth, into the mire of mud, forming a shallow little trench. He said, “Before my dad died he talked of going out west. New Mexico. Arizona. We joked about it. I wonder how serious he was about it now. Maybe I’ll drive out there. Drive right on through the fall. Quail-hunt these dogs all the way, wherever I can find a place to do it. Right on through the fall and winter. See what it’s like. See what all that country is about. I don’t know.”

She was silent behind him.