We lay and let nature roar over us for a while. I could hear a slight whistle from his nose, and loudest of all, my own awkward swallowing. “How is it really going?” he said.

I’d told Lindsay about Arctic explorers, butterflies, and the school-bus-sized raptor. I thought about telling Isaac the same. But he didn’t like associations and groupings, the oblique Dice style; he preferred forthrightness. So I talked about the way we wanted for nothing—“The only troubles we have are the ones we create for ourselves,” I said, thinking about Queen’s face when Pear had busted in on us that night in the dairy. “I’m telling you,” I said to Isaac, “we are self-contained. We are independent.” I thought about nursing lambs and singing under the stars. Bathing in the creek. The cold fresh smell when spring came up. The fertilizer-irrigation tank. The sungolds. I once asked Dice, Is the Ash Family a utopia?, and he said, We’re much too careful for that, but he was not quite right. To Isaac, I said, “There is a way to live in harmony with the Earth.”

I noticed that he did not seem to be paying attention. “Come on, now, Isaac,” I said, feeling sheepish.

“You sound happy here.” He paused for so long I thought he’d fallen asleep. “But I think you could be happy in Durham, too.”

I shook my head.

“You’re fooling yourself if you think you’ll be able to stick it out here.” He was looking up at the barn’s shadowed rafters. “You’re not a commune person.”

I felt a quick hot anger. He couldn’t know. I didn’t have a definite self.

“You could take what you’ve learned here,” he said, “and I’d help you, we could buy a little house with a sleeping porch, I’ve been looking around for us, a porch and a garden, you’d see. I’d take your photo, and you could grow us some strawberries, we could plant another gardenia, we could drive out to see Blackbeard, we could see where they wrote Croatoan on the tree . . .”

“I’m tired,” I said, though I was listening carefully.

“With my photography, we could afford . . .”

I knew the walls had eyes, but I lacked the willpower to end the conversation. I imagined leisure, the warm summer concrete, block parties with luminaries, my hand out the car window buffeted by the rushing air. Maybe I could find an essential life in Durham too.

“I’m sorry I left you,” he said, though hadn’t I left him? “I want you back.”

I looked at the side of his face, colorless in the electric lantern light. I knew I should say I won’t come, but I couldn’t form the words. He looked straight up into the smoky dark.

“I’d ask you to marry me,” he said.