"There, there," he said as Ruby grunted, her wet snout wriggling. He fed her a handful of bran she ate greedily, slicking his palm with saliva.

Ry returned to the house. He washed his hands under the kitchen sink and began to prepare supper, scoring two fat potatoes from the bag under the sink—a few were starting to sprout, growing multiple eyes like hideous eldritch monsters in the damp dark beneath the counter—and dropping them on a greased dish to bake, one to eat tonight and the other he would save for tomorrow. When Barbara had still been with him, she would cook four. Though he'd never cared for leftovers he kept up the tradition in her absence.

It had been many years since the Mulligan house had any extra mouths to feed, outside of the occasional dinner guest. Barbara hadn't cared for children—her six nieces and nephews had been enough for her—and with all the pregnant women waddling in and out of his office, Ry hadn't ever felt the urge to push for a similar scene at home.

He figured much of his ambivalence toward having children of his own stemmed from growing up in Barrows Bay. The old midwives had terrified him when he was a boy. On Sundays his mother would schlep him round to their homes to "pay their respects," until his father put a stop to the practice once he was old enough to help out in the field and the barn.

Mavis Lynch had frightened him most, with her shrewd gray eyes and the ridged terrain of pale scars on her balding head and nape as if from some long-ago fire. He suspected it was why she'd been the one to call up to their bedroom window that night when Barbara was dressed in her nightgown and he in his skivvies, the moon high and bright and cold in the black autumn sky.

The memory of looking out the window at that awful old maid's pale moonface gave him a cold chill. He twisted the dial on the oven and the gas came on with a hiss and a dull thump. He went at a frozen clump of chicken breasts with a steak knife—something Barbara would have paled at—prying them apart until one snapped free, clattering on the glass dish.

Barbara's pale-yellow curtains hung limply at the kitchen window. Beyond, the sky had already begun to darken.

Ry looked out at the barn. His joints ached thinking about the work he'd have to do tomorrow to get Ruby's pen clean enough for her to farrow within the next few days.

Barbara had always gone by the adage Don't put off until tomorrow what you could do today. Ry never cared for it. He was a procrastinator at heart. Her absence made him acutely aware of it. He'd often wondered if he ever would've made it through med school if he hadn't met her midway through that first semester of junior year.

She was Barbara Claire then, a slightly prissy seventeen-year-old with a blonde bob haircut, white bobby socks and penny loafers. Handing out tracts for some nascent libbers meeting and he'd just about stumbled over himself to get his hands on one, not caring a lick what it was for, only needing an excuse to get close to her.