“The Lions certainly stink.”

“Yes, they do.”

“They’re worse this year, now that they’re trying those new formations.”

“Yeah.”

They talked football a while longer and then they excused themselves and went out walking in the fresh air. The road skirted the state forest, most of it replanted pines in neat rows—rows deep and long and splicing through each other at angles, so that when he looked down them he got a strange infinite sense, a sense that there were Scotch pines stretching on into eternity, and yet ending directly before his eyes.

“My father’s pretty quiet,” she said. She meant something else but wasn’t going to say it, he could tell. The smell of sap hung in the air. He was glad fall had arrived so quickly. The tourists had cleared out of town and his work at the market was slow and easy.

“You should come down and live with me,” he said. It was the open span of road that prompted him to make the statement, the movement of their feet over the old concrete.

“I can’t leave him right now,” she said. “I can’t really explain it, but he’s not stable. I don’t know what he’d do without me.”

They walked up to the next entry road—dusty brown dirt ending at a chain-link fence that posted the state forest regulations on a white sign. “It’s just that when my mother died, I kind of took over the role of…” That was as far as she was going to go. She took him by the neck and kissed him. “Come on. Let’s do it here.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, why not. No one comes down this way. They come in along the southern part. Even the rangers don’t come up here.”

So they made love, and later, after the funeral, the next summer, he’d remember that abrupt end to the conversation, the way she hung from his neck like a kid, the feeling of her body in her tight jeans, her legs firm, locked behind him, falling back into a blanket of pine needles and moss; it was cold that day and the places where their flesh touched seemed to burn with unnatural heat. He came quickly, was done with it, and the question he had raised on the road, of her coming down to live with him, was lost. But on the beach, alone on the spot where he imagined his brother had once held him under the crook of his arm, that moment in the woods seemed pivotal. The questions he might have asked, the digging he might have done if he hadn’t allowed his search for the truth, for answers, to evaporate his lust, and his love, and the sensation of the sky being held up over their heads by the tips of pine trees. Love, he would later think, on the beach, is a dispelling of reality; it tears the truth out from under you.

The funeral, held at a parlor in Sault Ste. Marie, was the strange occasion you might expect because, of course, no body had been recovered. A simple pine casket had been selected and people were allowed to place into it things that represented her life in some way; there were ribbons that had held her hair back, small curls of yellow and blue, placed there by her aunt Grace; there was her maroon high school letter sweater, a big felt varsity K, for Kalkaska, with a silver set of wings she earned running cross country one year; there were dolls she had once held and the Ovation guitar she had played, the rounded bottom tucked into the corner of the red silk lining. It looked a bit strange, somewhat like a body.