He tried not to think about her too much when he was at work. He tried to think about his hands and where to keep them as the huge wheels turned and the die came down and shook the concrete floor where he stood on the skid with his cotton gloves and his rubber-suction-cup rod. There was two weeks’ vacation a year, time he usually spent in his garden, early in the spring when everything needed to be tended to, when the pole beans needed poles and the tomatoes needed staking and tying off, when the grass was coming strong in the watermelons and they needed a good hoeing out. If she was okay, or sleeping, sometimes he would fish, settled against a tree on the riverbank, a small can of worms beside him, the line lying slack in the slow, muddy river current, flotsam piled in the eddies, empty milk jugs and beer cans and tiny sticks and trash. But he thought of her even then, wondering if she was all right, if he should stop fishing and go see if she needed anything. The two weeks always overwhelmed him. Here were two whole weeks where almost anything might be accomplished, where a man might search out and find a better job, one that paid more money, that was not so dangerous and depressing, one that might allow him to buy a better car, new furniture, a motorized wheelchair, any number of things that might improve their lives. She had never been able to have any children and Tiny had accepted it early, but he still grieved in his heart for the loss of what might have been, children to come home to, to help with their homework, to take fishing. And there never seemed to be enough time in the two weeks to do all the things that needed doing. Each year he told himself that he was going to get ahold of a truck and some men to help him move the pianos out of the yard, but there were always other things to tend to, a coat of paint on the house, the reworking of her little flower gardens, and every afternoon the trip to town for the little half-pint bottle. She would not allow him to buy a fifth. She would say that she was not alcoholic and did not need a fifth. She would say that all she needed was a little half-pint. And Tiny never even thought, for a long while, of arguing with her. He loved her too much.