“It’s pretty well jammed in there,” he said, meeting the anxious inquiry of this woman who had been his teacher for years, so thin and nervous, with that exploded frizz of hair. His heart felt as if it were about to jar loose inside him. How easily he might have died. It came to him then: in the graze on her hand; in the funny way she walked, almost as if her knees were hinged side to side, rather than back to front. It came to him like the decision to drink, to get to that place where nothing mattered and something might just be revealed. Reveal: the fleshy, vulnerable, or obscene hinge between one thing and another, between touching and not touching, desiring and feeling numb, bringing to life and destroying. The hinge: his mother’s open legs, a hung pig’s cut throat, Miss Kelly’s cleavage all those years ago when she bent down to his school desk. As he stood up, he felt as if he were Bennet, felt that man’s hulking gravity and dogged focus, even the slight list of his body, as if Bennet’s weighty and impenetrable hide had been placed upon him. And what a relief it was to feel that combination of numbness and singular will.

“I have to get this Dart done by five. I’ll drop you off home. I can bring the bike around later.”

“Oh, I can walk,” she said. “And I’ll collect the bike. I’ll come by after school tomorrow. How much do you think?”

He made a dismissive gesture.

“No, I must pay you.” She squinted anxiously at him through those big glasses.

“Do you want some iodine for your hand?”

“Oh, no, I’ll do that at home. All right, then. Thank you.”

A sudden agonized creak was followed by a heavy crash.

“Oh, good heavens!” Miss Kelly said, cringing as she stared behind him. Her expressions were always ridiculously exaggerated. He had heard somewhere that this was because her parents had both been deaf from birth. The shifted jack had failed. The Dart had fallen off. Frank didn’t even turn around. He felt exhilarated.

Frank rode the bike to her house at almost nine-thirty that evening. He had been tempted to drink, but didn’t want to confuse that with this. All afternoon he had thought about her: not unattractive, this strange woman, with her puppetlike movements, who released herself with such abandon to her singing in church. She threw herself into every town event—the Wednesday potluck socials, the quilting circles and bake sales, the high school teams—but she didn’t have any close friends. Perhaps because she would never speak in any personal way, refused to gossip, and talked about nothing but school. And what of men? As far as he knew, she had never dated anyone. He remembered Jude’s crude joke about why she rode her bike so much.