He’d been hoping for more. Idiot that he was, he never realized impossibility until he’d run himself smack into a wall. His mother said he was a romantic. She didn’t realize he was just a drunk, half out of his mind most of the time, imagining things that never could be. Believing the things he enacted. So he’d skulked out of Pine Rapids, embarrassed and—there was no denying it—forlorn.

Feeling sorry for himself, he’d spent a couple of days at a resort near Rhinelander, where the fishing was good. He’d met a woman there, too, a waitress at the café where he ate three meals a day for three days. The food wasn’t bad, and it was cheap. The waitress was blond, lonely-married, half in love with him by breakfast the second day. The third night, she came knocking on his cabin door. He was drunk; she had him almost before he realized it. He didn’t remember much, just flashes—the curtain of her hair, the heat of her thighs encasing him as she moved atop him, his own snarling cries. Then, she was sprawled on the floor of his cabin, cursing him, her hair a tangle. Perhaps he had cursed her back, angry that she’d made him break his rule about not fooling around with married girls. He hadn’t been doing well with that recently. In any case, he didn’t know, now, what had happened, only that when he woke up, the sole evidence of her visit was a lipstick stain on the collar of his shirt. He left that morning before the dew was gone.

He wanted to be a good man, like his father, but there were so many other things he wanted, too. A little comfort; ease bordering on numbness. A sense of vitality and purpose, of being where he was meant to be, and what he was meant to be. The way he’d felt with Anne, that night all those years ago. The way he’d felt with Dolly. It was funny, he supposed, that it was only girls that weren’t available that he’d ever felt that way about.

He knew better than to think it was anything that could last, but he never could stop seeking that crystalline moment of hope and forgiveness fused in a light so bright that it blinded you to pain, to memories.

In the meantime, he drank. That was another thing that could get you by.