He went down to the kitchen, where the yellow wall phone with the extra-long cord was, and found it lying facedown on the counter. Alice was there, along with Paulette and Diana, the three of them sitting around the kitchen table with tall glasses of iced tea, playing cards. Alice’s hair was bushed out, a mass of sun-bleached streaks and split ends that were testimony to a summer on the lake, a summer that seemed to have gone on from the beginning of time and was destined to go on till time ended and the universe became formless all over again. Her hair. Alice’s hair. All of a sudden it was exploding in his face—Pow!—a supernova immolating itself right there in the kitchen. All three of them looked up at him, but he didn’t have anything to give them, not gossip, explanation or apology, not even a greeting. Joanie was on the phone. Joanie. It didn’t seem possible.

He picked up the receiver and eased himself through the door and out into the hallway, the cord trailing behind him. “Hello?” he said. “Joanie?”

“Hi,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound like hers at all so that when she asked, “How’re you doing?” he thought it was some sort of trick, some stranger playing a gag on him—one of the kids, even, from the upstairs extension.

“Fine,” he said, and everything seemed to fall back in place. Joanie. It was Joanie on the other end of the line.

“Fine? It’s been weeks—weeks now, Fitz—and all you can say is fine?”

“Well, it’s, I don’t know—what do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say you miss me, miss your son. Couldn’t you even call? Or what, write a letter? You don’t have time for a letter?”

“I did call.”

“Once.”

“Okay, I told you, right, that we’re not allowed to use the phone for long-distance? Because of the financial situation here?”

Her voice came right back at him and there was no feeling in it, no feeling at all. “You couldn’t go to a pay phone? What happened, did somebody come in the dead of night and steal all the pay phones in town? What about the one on the wall in the back hallway of the bar—what about that one?”

This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. Actually, he didn’t want to have any conversation at all right now because everything kept shifting on him, the whole room, the whole house, all these objects that couldn’t manage to keep still. He wasn’t having a flashback, he wasn’t tripping, and if he was drunk he hadn’t been drunk long enough or in a determined-enough way to give himself the D.T.’s—so what was this? Life? Life without the sacrament, without Joanie, without Corey.