“I’d forgotten that.” I glanced at my hand. It was various shades of purple. “I’d better have this checked. Your father knows where the bourbon is. Just lock the doors until he gets here, okay?”

Her brow knit. “Don’t make a scene with him. Please.”

“I don’t think that’s up to me.”

Her look at me was long and thoughtful. Then she turned away as if speaking to herself. “Why are you doing this, Adam? Why are you doing this now?”

Her question lingered in the silence. I left for the doctor’s.

When I got there an officious nurse gave me a form to fill out. I did that, still remembering how Kris Ann and I had begun to learn each other, after that first night.

We were together often, doing everything and nothing. I would tease about her debutante party, watching amused as she accepted service at the cheap diner I could pay for with the ease of manner that suggested we had just come in from riding, when more likely we were fresh from making love. Lovemaking left her shamelessly hungry, and she would stalk from our bed to the refrigerator, ripping through my leftovers with noises of mock disappointment until we had to go out. “This isn’t a refrigerator,” she said one evening, “it’s an aluminum mine,” and after that she had stocked the kitchen with food and spices and begun cooking fine dinners of pasta, served by candlelight at my kitchen table, with red wine. She’d learned pasta from a book, she told me, because it wasn’t southern, and she was full of questions about the way I’d lived: about my home and father and how I’d made it since, about the steel mill I’d worked in and the ore boat with the drunken captain that I’d served on one summer, running ore from Minnesota to the docks in Cleveland. My job now was our dishes, but sometimes we would look at each other and leave them. One night, afterward, she lay on my shoulder, absorbed in her own thoughts. “It’s funny,” she finally said.

“What’s funny?”