When she got home, there would be more to do: taking down awnings and bird feeders, folding up the lawn chairs left out after her daughters’ afternoon tanning sessions. It would be nearly six o’clock before she finished, no time to write or even sit down for a moment. She unlocked and opened her cabinet again and rummaged beneath the folders for the familiar, crinkly package: a stale pack of menthols she was saving for such a day as this. She closed her fingers around the package, then let go. She had a stack of papers to grade, and surely Rick was not taking a break at his job. He didn’t believe in breaks and would work straight through a twelve-hour, hot-sun day, just to set an example for his crew. Everything in Rick’s world was done according to a predictable schedule and for a purpose; he didn’t believe in anything as wasteful as a smoke break. Janine imagined what the cigarette would taste like, outside, with the wind whipping and the air taking on a sudden sharpness.

In the early years of their marriage, Janine had stayed home, and even then she had written—stories for the girls, letters to her sister, then to the editors of various North Florida newspapers. She had never written poetry, not until this year, and she couldn’t explain it well to anyone except Rick, who had been her truest confidant ever since they’d started dating, way back in high school. “I don’t know how it happened,” she told him. “It’s like I’m suddenly talking in a new language.”

She’d shyly handed the poems over one morning in bed, and Rick had handled them reverently, then excused himself for his morning BM. After spending an entire hour with them, in the bathroom, he confessed that he did not understand the new language she was speaking, but he believed whatever it was must be coming from God. Rick believed firmly in the intervening hand of God; he was like one of those biblical men who built boats and temples on command, the kind of man, strong and certain, that the world didn’t make anymore. Janine sometimes felt an acute pain for her daughters, knowing they’d never find a man like their father.

“Why do you need to go someplace else to write?” Rick had asked her early this morning when she showed him the application to the Ranch, which she did not tell him she’d mailed two weeks ago.

At the beginning of the summer, he’d built Janine a solarium, an octagonal room with glass walls and smooth white oak floors. He’d set her desk in the center of the room, facing out at the various staked finch feeders in their yard, and when Beth, their older daughter, had wanted to use the space for her elliptical trainer, Rick had told her no, her mother needed that room to write.