She touched her face with her fingertips. Her skin felt flushed.

She turned and left the room, moved through the house to the front door, opened it, stepped outside, lifted her face to the moonlight and inhaled slowly, taking the cool of the night into her lungs and with it, the scent of honeysuckle and pine and corn grown in the garden behind her home.

A deer moved under the low-hanging limbs of a hemlock in the tree line separating the house from the road, and she stepped back instinctively, knowing she was barely dressed. She had learned that lesson. Or thought she had. A few months after Boyd’s death, she had seen a man peering into the window of her home as she undressed. The man had run away, but had been caught by the sheriff. A hiker from Atlanta, giving the excuse of being lost, saying he had only stopped by the house for directions, making it out to be nothing but a big mistake. He had paid a fine and had been warned to stay in Atlanta. Supposedly, the sheriff had said to him, “You show up around here again, looking in windows, and we’re going to kill you. That’s about as straight as I can put it.”

Afterward, she had sensed eyes watching her from dark places.

Deer eyes were all right, though.

A breeze tickled her bare legs, slipped under the hem of her pajama top, spread across her skin.

An urge to laugh shimmered across her chest, an urge to find playmates, to listen to the bird-chattering voices of the friends of her childhood when promise was everywhere, before promise became confined to her husband.

The smile that had worked its way into her face from the energy of the urges faded. She did not have friends. Not really. She knew people, but she did not have friends. Not the kinds of friends who left little pieces of themselves with her after a visit, little pieces of laughter and noisy talk scattered over the house like the confetti of a parade.

She heard another sound coming from the yard and looked toward it. A raccoon ran into a sheet of moonlight, paused, gave a masked-eye look toward her, then scurried off. She turned and went back into her home.

In bed, she thought again of The Grapes of Wrath, remembering the scene of the death of Grampa, and of his burial, and how the Joads had coped with the question of reporting the old man’s death, and how Tom had written of the dying on a sheet of paper torn from a Bible and of that sheet of paper being put in a jar to be buried with him, and how Granma had slept during his burial-all of it done to save the money they were using to go to California.

In many ways, her life was not much better off than that of the Joads driving away from the Oklahoma dust bowl, headed for the place called California, she thought. In California almost anything seemed possible.