Ed hands his wife the leash with the tiniest reluctance. Alice snaps the clip onto the ring. Ed takes it out of her hand. “I’ll take him out.”

Alice takes the leash back. “No. I will.” She doesn’t even make it sound like she’s doing him a favor. “I’m going to take him for a proper walk.”

“Where?”

“I should take a plastic bag, I guess. I don’t think I want him soiling the neighbors’ yards.”

Ed snags a plastic grocery bag out of the calico sleeve they stuff them into. “Guess we’d better stop using the green bags at the store for a while.”

The dog is dancing on his little front feet, his tail swinging in anticipation of a walk. He looks from one to the other, a little furry linesman.

“He might be a little strong on that leash. You don’t want him pulling you down the street.”

“I’ll be fine.” Alice gathers the leash in her hands.

“Be careful on the road. It’s getting dark earlier.”

“I won’t be long.”

Ed asks again, “Where are you going?”

Alice knows what he’s driving at. He’s holding her up, questioning her decision-making abilities. “To the old path.”

The old path is an ancient way that begins at the end of their dead-end road, which takes its name, Old Path Road, from it. It wends through the woods for a mile or so, to the rocky banks of the Moody River. The path meanders along the top of the escarpment, following the river, until it ends at the ruins of the old pistol factory. A set of steps lead down the steep grade to the quarter-acre millpond, where the Moody River was once harnessed for power. Alice and Ed courted along that path, holding hands, dreaming their future, walking to the place where there once was a footbridge, now a pair of stone abutments facing each other, separated by the river water that cascades over the dam in the spring. The slippery rocks are the perfect place to fish for the trout that the conservation commission stock in the millpond of dammed water. It was the place where Ed taught Stacy how to fish. They practiced mostly catch and release. Like him, Stacy preferred the hunt to the kill, and frankly, nobody in the house really liked freshwater fish all that much. In late summer, after dinner, he and Stacy would grab the poles and walk the path to the south abutment, where they would drop in their lines and call it fishing. That time of year, the Moody River no longer cascaded over the edge of the dam, escaping gently through the ancient sluice gates, so they might walk single file along the narrow lip of the dam to get to the north-side abutment, where the big trout were rumored to live, Ed holding Stacy’s shoulder in front of him. Stacy was warned over and over never to go there alone. Ever.

Because the path also branches off to Alice’s mother’s house, they used to let Stacy use it to go to her grandmother’s, because she wouldn’t have to cross any roads. She wouldn’t be in danger.