Hook was the last to go to bed that night. As he went around turning out the lights and locking up, he stepped out onto the porch and looked through the black-limbed maples of the lawn at the main pasture, which was frost-covered, silver in the moonlight. The same clearness of sky that had made the day warmer now deepened the night cold, so that his breath plumed in front of him. In the summer the porch was screened and when he was finished working in the evening he would sit out in his favorite wicker chair reading until the light failed or talking with the children or Arnie or Aunt Marian, who sat in the chain-hung swing squeaking slowly back and forth, measuring the passing of the day as evenly as a clock’s pendulum. Finally, as the others turned in, he would remain there alone in the darkness drinking wine or beer and eating pistachio nuts, sometimes watching the herd out in the pasture if the moon was bright enough. Often the boys would be out somewhere, and in time he would hear their car—the Jeep usually—on the blacktop and then he would see its lights shining in the tops of the trees and then finally the headlights themselves as the vehicle crested the hill and came on toward the house. A few times this past summer the boys had arrived home less than sober, and on those occasions there was almost nothing they had not found hilarious, including their father. Most of their commentary had to do with his sitting in the dark drinking wine all by himself, sallies like “Well, it’s better than in the closet” or “My father, the wino” or “You sure you can make it home, Dad?”—but a good deal of it was their own exclusive humor, an idiom that went safely over, under, around, and through him, and which they seemed to find doubly funny because of it. Usually one or both of them would sit with him for a while and he would gently probe them about what was going on in their world, seeking reassurance that girls and booze and sports were still the order of the day and that the two of them were not nightly driving off to do business with some friendly neighborhood drug pusher. He still found it preposterous that the drug plague had reached even the Banner Hills of America, but it had, and he watched his children—their arms, their eyes, their attitude and stamina—for the slightest sign of the plague. With Jenny, both boys expressed repeatedly the opinion that drug users were “creeps and losers” and he believed they meant it. Nevertheless, just as Hook’s own mother had anxiously watched him for any sign of sore throat or backache during the peak polio season in late summer, so he watched his children the year around for symptoms of the dread contemporary disease.