She thought a moment, then launched into a description of the Bear Trap River, how it was draped in hemlock and birch so that it looked much narrower than it was, the way the water sparkled in the spring as the ice melted, the rush of the rapids in summer, the fallen leaves sailing down it in the fall. The frozen hush of it in winter; the deer that came out of the woods and stood on its ice to sniff the white air. She told him about the arched bridge that bisected the Bear Trap and led north out of downtown to the burned-out, abandoned mill, where, as a child, she used to go and sneak in the buildings with her older brother, JJ, to prove she wasn’t a scaredy-cat. She told him about how when JJ and his three pals had joined up with the Marines just after Pearl Harbor, the whole town had turned out at the depot to see them off to Basic Training at Parris Island.

“JJ was so excited,” she told him. “My mom—her name is Mary—she was fit to be tied, him leaving school early, but my father, Jack, he said if he wanted to go, then they’d better just let him. I guess my dad hated it, too, but he was so proud of him, you could tell; my dad joined the Marines himself right away back when the First World War started. And everyone in town treated JJ and his friends like heroes, and gave them a great send-off. Every Sunday at church, they still say a special prayer for JJ. You can’t help but be glad that everyone’s behind them like that. Everyone’s behind all of you boys. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Course, it makes a heap of difference to a guy to have a girl back home to write to, who’s waiting for him to get home.”

“Yes, I wish my brother did—” she said, then belatedly caught his meaning.

He let it pass with a little smile. “So Pine Rapids isn’t a big town, I reckon,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she said, recovering. “Everyone knows everybody else’s business. My father’s the head of the draft board and every time he has to call up somebody’s number, he can’t sleep for two or three nights before and after, on account of he knows all of them, and he knows their parents, and, like I told you, he fought in the Great War himself. He doesn’t like war at all, but he says it has to be done, sometimes, when there’s great evil in the world.”

“Well, that may be,” Nick said. “But tonight I’d like to look in your pretty eyes and dance with you.”

She was embarrassed; it seemed she’d been talking too much. “I’d like that, too,” she said.