He and Kate had spent one month each summer at the farm with his widowed grandfather and Aunt Marian and Uncle Arnie, who lived with the old man and helped him run his small dairy-herd operation. That third summer, with no job ahead in the fall, and with Bobby an infant and Chris two years old, Hook had worked on a daily basis for other farmers in the area while he tried to think of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. His fourth week there, combining wheat on a hot July day, his grandfather helped give him an answer. They had stopped working at noon—Hook, his grandfather, and Arnie—and had gone back to the house to restore their energies with one of Aunt Marian’s typically huge noontime meals. Afterwards, the old man went out on the porch and sat down in his favorite rocker—and died. In his will he left the farm to Aunt Marian and to Hook’s father, neither of whom knew quite what to do with it. Aunt Marian did not want to leave the farm, and yet Arnie, who lived in mortal fear of debt and responsibility, would not take out the needed mortgage to buy out Hook’s father’s half of the farm. So Hook stepped in, first as their tenant—their sharecropper, Kate ruefully called him—but by his third year there, he had been able to negotiate a loan to buy them out and have the farm in his own name.

Though farming had given him a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment over the years, he could not pretend even to himself that there was no dark side to this bright harvest moon. Always there was the small but persistent doubt that he had done his best, had become all the man his intelligence and education would have permitted him to become. To a degree, he felt monastic, as if he had withdrawn from the “world,” the city-suburban white-collar arena where the substantive life of his time supposedly was being lived. And yet he could not think of any particular kind of work he might have done in that arena that would have been any more important or significant than that which he did. He never could have confused the fortunes and interests of a corporation with his own; he had already proven his unfitness for the education industry; and as for some sort of work in communications, the possibility of his having added to that cacophony of the forgettable did not excite him. Perhaps he might have done something in social work or government, but he did not know what. As it was, he produced enough protein to feed hundreds of people each year; he was a conscientious steward of slightly over one thousand acres of the planet’s limited land surface; and he had raised children who would more likely contribute to society than tear it down or live off it. Yet the doubt lived on.

Now, though, watching the dying fire settle into the fireplace grate, Hook had more pressing problems. His left leg had gone to sleep and the other pained him. He squirmed slightly and kissed the top of his daughter’s head, until she moved finally, waking. She muttered something unintelligible and then, seeing where she was, smiled sadly up at him.