He did not, however, at least not in the beginning. That chore he left to the newspapers, which the three of them passed anxiously back and forth while he drove.

“Oh my God,” Marian kept saying. “My dear God. I am so sorry, David.”

But Jenny rushed to her father’s defense. “It wasn’t Dad’s fault! Was it, Dad!”

Bobby answered for him. “Fault! What do you mean, fault? They only got what they deserved.”

“No more of that,” Hook told him.

“But they—”

“No more.”

Within an hour he was home again, driving up the hill on his own road through his own stark winter trees and into the open, past dun-colored pastures and the black cattle that meant so much to him and to whom he meant nothing at all. Then he circled up to the house and Arnie and the dogs came out to the car, and somehow they were the final seal on his homecoming. He was back. He was safe. He was home. Life would go on.

And it did. Christmas morning the family gathered around the tree and opened their presents, almost all of which had been bought by Aunt Marian, including an electric blanket that was marked “to Marian from David.” Jenny played Christmas carols and rock numbers on a new portable stereo and after chores Hook and Bobby and Arnie settled down in front of the television and watched the Dallas Cowboys football team defeat the Vikings on a gray day in Bloomington, Minnesota. Then, with Jenny, the men tried to do justice to one of Marian’s typical holiday feasts, a groaning table of roast turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and yams and two kinds of cranberries and the same of oysters, and of course pumpkin pie and whipped cream.

Then Christmas was over, and New Year’s passed too, and gradually Hook found that sometimes entire hours would pass without his thinking about California and Liz and the others. The family knew the whole story by then of course, except for the truth of his relationship with Liz. And from the beginning Marian seemed to be the only one who understood how much his “success” out on the coast had cost him. Hook in fact was shocked at the attitude of Jenny and Bobby, though he reminded himself that they were only a few years out of childhood, and as a father and onetime teacher he needed no instruction in the callousness and even brutality of the young.

But he was unprepared for the reaction of his neighbors and the townspeople once they began hearing about it, and especially after the weekly Banner Hill Bugle featured the story on its front page, including a verbatim reprinting of the articles from the two California papers, which Bobby had taken to the editor without his father’s permission or even knowledge. Suddenly Hook was everybody’s hero, the local man who had “showed them California dudes a thing or two.” Men who before had always given him a wide berth as “uppity” and unfriendly were now thrusting their hands out at him to shake and even clapping him on the back—doing it once anyway, for he did not welcome the friendship of people who could find easy pleasure in the deaths of strangers.