Toward the end, they were getting careless. Once, trying to find privacy down a dirt road, they got her heavy Mercedes stuck in the March mud and had to phone for a tow truck from the home of the owner of the property they were trespassing upon. Tired of sleazy motels and furtive excursions, they would sneak him into her house, with Jock off and the children at school and no plumber or cleaning woman scheduled to show up. To bring them, after a while, something to eat or drink, she would wander naked through the winter-bright rooms, like a deer at home in the camouflaging forest. Returning to him where he lay languid in the wrecked guestroom bed, she would laugh at something, something utterly marvelling and grateful, she saw in his face. She would laugh, and her mouth would stay open a second longer as the girlish high sound died away. Even now, an elderly resident of Haskells Crossing, looking both ways before judiciously forcing his creaky body to cross the street, he feels his heart skip when he sees a young woman of a certain taut, bony-faced type emerge from the 7-Eleven or wait in front of the new Starbucks, giving someone she suddenly spots on the street a big grin, exposing her gums as well as her teeth, as Faye used to greet him at one of her and Jock’s parties. She has come back to him.

ix. Convalescence

It was Faye who ended it, by telling her husband. She let Owen know over the phone. When he, knocked nearly breathless by the betrayal, asked her why, she was vague. “Oh—my shrink thought I was getting confused. It was too much, Owen. I didn’t know what you wanted, and it was killing me, frankly. I’m sorry. If I hadn’t loved you so much, I could have handled it better.”

“But you never told me any of this. You were always so gay, so—so giving and cheerful. Like this was all you wanted. Even that time we got stuck, the cool way you offered to pay the man for repairing the ruts, after using his phone. You were wonderful, Faye.” Meaning wonderful in everything, and said very softly. Owen was at his desk, with Ed in the next cubicle and their employees passing by with coffee and folders. He murmured into the receiver with his back turned and his chair, an ergonomic swivel on a five-roller chrome pedestal, facing the wire-webbed window. If he stood up he could have seen the Chunkaunkabaug, most of its rocks concealed beneath the fast-running meltwater, heading for the falls.