“Was there, have there been, had you been having”—Alice glanced furtively at Lauren—“personal difficulties of any kind?” On Alice’s sweater, Rudolph’s eyes wobbled with horror in their plastic sockets.

“No. Dave just said our marriage was cold, dead weight on his shoulders, like a snake.”

“Oh, my darling!” Alice hugged Lauren protectively cheek to cheek. “You shouldn’t be hearing these things! We all need to go to bed and think about this in the morning, when we’re fresh.”

Alice’s guest room was perfectly designed for peaceful slumber, but Sally could not sleep. She lay down on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and counted up all the years she had been married to Dave. The first few fumbling years, setting up house together; then the years of comfortable routine; then those miserable two years when Dave quit his job at R & R Roofing to train bird dogs. They and all those dogs had had to live on her teacher’s salary while Dave tried to make a go of it. But just as everybody had told him in the beginning, the planta-tions had their own dog men, and after two years Dave had to sell the dogs and crawl back to R & R with his tail between his legs, and nothing to show for it but the concrete-and-chain-link dog runs in the backyard filling up with leaves. That was when she had first seen that look in Dave’s eyes she had seen tonight. But two years later Mr. Randolph retired, and they made Dave a partner at R & R. Then they had had Addie for those joyful four years, not knowing what was to come.

“Many marriages cannot survive the death of a child,” the counselors had told them, but they had survived. It seemed as if the hard part must be over. What had gone wrong, and what should she have done about it?

Sally got up and sat in the fluffy chair by the window. She stared at the wall and thought about the first time she had ever seen Dave. He was putting a sheet-metal roof on the lunchroom of the school where she was a new teacher. His hair shone just like gold in the gleam from the roof, and he wore his nail apron slung low across his hips, the way Matt Dillon wore his holster in Gunsmoke.

The first time Dave ever spoke to her, Elvis Presley was singing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” on the jukebox at the Ship Ahoy. Dave looked over at her from the bar. “Howdy,” he said. Sally had been embarrassed to look at him because she felt as if everybody in the Ship Ahoy could surely tell Elvis Presley was singing that song just for her. It must show.