He drives off the Point onto the wide, snow-swept main street of Traverse City. Color seems bled from the shop buildings on both sides, and there isn’t much action going on except for two pickups parked across from a tavern. Dry, powdery snow sifts across the street.

“It’s just—just that I know that this is the right time for you to stay overnight.”

He’s in love with the image of it; when he woke with her in his arms, there would be that pale blue light outside from the new snow; the soft silence of his room above the store, up close to the rafters. He’d make love to her again, then, but this time afterward they’d lie with that abandon, that wild hope, of two lovers who had slept through an entire night together for the first time. He hadn’t slept with a girl a whole night through and still had that sense that the act was, by all means, a sacred one. In sleep there were secret movements and motions that one never knew. Pulling in front of the shop he feels a new urgency. He’ll beg and plead.

He says, “I want you to stay. I want to, well, I feel like I have to beg you but I don’t want to beg you. It’s just that—well, I know he’s going to be pissed off, and maybe you’d better stay down here for a few days, or I don’t know, I mean why don’t you move in with me? You can work in the shop. I need an extra hand. And for God’s sake, this weather. You shouldn’t be driving in this weather.”

“No,” she says. He kills the motor and in the silence that opens up there is the roar of the wind, coming from the west, pushing past the buildings—and the grainy white hiss of metal being blasted by dry snow.

Was it the force of her father’s personality, or something physical, that drove her away, back over the bridge? He never knew, exactly. Crossing the threshold of the house in the Upper Peninsula, he met a man wearing loose reading glasses, an old-fashioned ribbed undershirt, with hairy arms well defined from outdoor work. Her father did odd jobs, hauled lumber, chopped wood, pieced together a semblance of living from whatever that depressed region offered up. He spoke in a soft but firm voice that led one to believe he was from further north, maybe Canada. There was a hint of French floating around in his words.

“What do you do, son?” her father wondered. It came out as a prompt, fatherly question, with only a hint of that hardness he’d heard in other girlfriends’ dads.

“I manage a food market, at Traverse City,” he said.

A few seconds opened up after he gave an answer; the house was cold and drafty. It was late in the afternoon on a fall day. There was a football game, the Lions, with the sound down on the television set. “That’s good. At least you have employment,” he said, sipping his beer without tipping the can, just drawing the foam rising out of the hole.