Julia may have wandered outdoors, in her flip-flops. She loves the outdoors, site of weather and of traffic. In summer she wanders into her garden, beginning to pull weeds, in her nightie; its hem becomes soaked with dew, her flip-flops get muddy. He has to go downstairs in his pajamas to win a response. He even paddles out in his bare feet onto the asphalt driveway, not hot enough to burn in the early morning. During two decades of residence here, in this or that small emergency (a car door left ajar and the inner lights devouring battery juice, or a newspaper carelessly thrown into bushes as the delivery man careened around the circle in the pre-dawn dark, or a watering hose absent-mindedly left running when they went to bed, its sound audible in their bedroom like a murmuring heart), Owen has trod barefoot on the macadam in a range of weathers, even in some fresh inches of snow, and found that for a few steps almost anything could be borne, snow and heat imparting to dulled, shoe-bound nerves an invigorating elemental shock.

He wants to share a dream with her. He often wakes with such a desire, though Julia long ago established a considerable lack of interest in his nocturnal brain activity. It is important to strike in the first waking minutes, before the dream’s delicate structure is crushed under humdrum reality’s weight.

Last night he dreamed that, standing on the lawn on the sea side of their white house, he saw her go off, in her black BMW, on one of her innumerable errands or escapes to Boston. He saw her car, as shiny as patent leather, rush by and, immediately after it, his shabby maroon Mitsubishi follow, driven not by him but by Julia again, her pale profile preoccupied. His first wife, Phyllis, had also held her head in this tense, eye-catching way when behind the wheel—tipped slightly back as if in anticipation of the engine’s exploding.