Middle Falls was for Owen an institute of middle-class know-how. Chunky, red-faced Jock Dunham, who had a lovely lithe hard-laughing wife, taught him how to make a martini, a brandy stinger, a white-wine spritzer, and an old-fashioned (you dissolve the sugar in a little water before the ice and bourbon). Ruminative, pipe-puffing Henry Slade, who shuffled paper in Connecticut’s Department of Revenue, was methodically handy at husbandry, and explained to Owen how he stacked fresh-cut wood for a year outdoors and then in a special dry room in his cellar another twelve months to assure a clean blaze in his fireplace. His wife, Vanessa, was plain and civically active, with wide shoulders, thick eyebrows, and a disconcertingly direct, appraising gaze; she instructed the new couple how to vote, locally, and when to set out their trash, and how it should be sorted. Ian Morrissey, a free-lance illustrator, owned an aging Thunderbird convertible and a new green Jaguar and shared automotive expertise; the Mackenzies had never owned a car before acquiring a Studebaker Lark station wagon that handled poorly in the snow and didn’t always start in the rain. After the initial two-year rental of the clapboarded semi-detached just off run-down, well-trafficked Common Lane, they felt able to buy a house, less central, out on bucolic Partridgeberry Road, with a big yard for the kids as they grew and a patch of woods beyond a pond choked with water-lilies and adorned with a collapsing wooden bridge. Roscoe Bisbee, once a country boy from Vermont, undertook to lead Owen through the rebuilding of the bridge, and explained about liming a lawn and applying dandelion killer, and where to buy the best riding mower. Riding mower, fertilizer spreader, posthole digger, shovels and rakes—they were acquired one by one. With the woods and yard trees came a chain saw, a pole saw, a Swedish band saw. Home repairs demanded not just hammers and screwdrivers but a table saw, for diagonal cuts that fit perfectly, and an electric drill with a case of bits of which the smallest was thread-thin and the biggest thick as a pencil, and socket wrenches measuring from three-sixteenths to three-quarters of an inch, and a blue staple gun. Owen’s basement became as formidably equipped as the ones he used to envy in Willow, with their panelled, linoleum-floored dens and Christmas yards on trestle-supported plywood.