He took a drink of his coffee, but said nothing. He thought of the fish, had another vision of Matthew slipping into the water.

“If I told the truth of it, I’d have to say I wake up just about every morning wanting to be somewhere else,” she said. “The only thing that keeps me here is the farm, and I don’t know why I’m so stubborn about that. I really don’t. I’m like a fish out of water in this place.” She smiled at the expression, added, “And I guess you know how that is better than anybody, as much fishing as you do.”

“I guess so,” he said.

“When I first came here, I didn’t know anything about this kind of life,” she continued. “I was just a spoiled town girl who was so much in love, it used to take my breath just thinking about it. Do you know what I did the first six months, Noah? I cooked. I barely knew how to boil eggs, so I decided I would become the best cook in the valley. I got cookbooks from everywhere, went to people like Ada Reynolds and other ladies, and stood beside them at their stoves. Boyd gained thirty pounds the first year we were married.” She shook her head, gave a sigh that had the sound of resignation. “I didn’t know anything about the farm—about chickens, or cows, or mules, or anything. But I learned. I learned because I wanted to be the kind of wife Boyd needed, and all the time, there was something inside me that kept wanting to get in the car and go home, because I knew I could never fit in. I wanted to be back in college. I wanted to go places and see things that would thrill me so much I would be lost for words to describe them. That something is still in me, and since Boyd’s death, I think about it all the time. Every single day, I think about it.”

She laughed sadly, offered another sigh. “But just when I decide I’m going to go crazy living here, something happens like today, and I know I’ll probably never find the same kind of people anywhere else,” she said. “I think it’s just the way country people are, though. They leave you alone until it bores you to death, and then when somebody needs them, they pop up out of the wood-work.” She paused, touched her hair in a way that made it seem like a nervous habit. “When Boyd died, I didn’t think many people would even show up at his funeral—dying the way he did, I mean—but I was wrong. The day after I found him, there were so many people at my house, I actually had a dream they were there to take everything away from me. I even checked my silverware after they left.”

She looked at him. “It goes to show you, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he said, and he remembered the death of his father, remembered the gathering of people crowding inside and outside the tenant house where they had lived.