“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.

After a bit he flicked the cigarette out into the mud and watched as it drenched through with rain and fell apart. When he couldn’t see any of it anymore, when the paper and tobacco were all mixed with the mud and gone, he said, “The thing is, I took you along, what I’m afraid of is everytime I looked at you I’d think about this place. And what I got to do. What I’ve got to do is put all this behind me.” He still did not look at her.

Her voice was very low. “You’re wrong. If you were to carry me along I’d just become a part of everywhere we went. You’ve got it backward. You leave me here, everytime you think of me you’ll think of everything else happened here. And I’ll get all mixed up with that. I’ll never be just me, to you, again. I’ve got forty-two dollars.”

He did not smile at this. But felt what he thought was a smile turn over within him. He stood, one last long look at the rain and turned to look at her. He did not say anything, just looked at her. As if reading every line of her, every part he could know or hope to know. To hold it with him. To take away with him. She saw him doing this.

“Then go,” she said.

“Daphne.”

“No. Just go. Go on.”

“Listen to me.”