Were there other nights, to follow? There might have been, but when he looked back, trying to recall each underlit detail, it didn’t seem so. Their futures came upon them fast. Elsie had another boyfriend for her senior year, and married yet another boy she met at the local Penn State extension. Surprisingly, they left the region, settling in the San Francisco area. If Owen wouldn’t take her away, another would.

They must have driven around that night, burning up gas, letting their heartbeats slow down, trying to talk into place what they had learned about each other and their own lives, before he drove her home, to Brechstown. It was a village almost in Chester County, an erratically spaced cluster such as Willow must have been before the advent of trolley cars made it a suburb of Alton. Right behind the houses were fields and farm buildings, barns whitewashed white by their Amish owners and silos built of a brown-glazed oversized brick. Mr. Seidel’s feed-and-hardware store, with its loading platform and checkered Purina ads, sat between a gas station and a one-man country barbershop, closed, its striped pole not turning. Elsie waited on store customers on Saturdays, and Owen had more than once shaken her father’s hand in there; Mr. Seidel was a muscular man bordering on fat, and even though he lifted eighty-pound feed sacks into the Mennonite trucks and Amish buggies he wore a shirt and a necktie and a gold tieclip. He would take Owen’s hand with an expert lunge, flashing a mischievous smile beneath a small, squared-off mustache. His house was a quarter-mile away, up a long crunching driveway, an old farmhouse like Owen’s own family’s but fussily improved. A new addition held a two-car garage below and a family room above, with a TV and built-in loudspeakers and furniture that all matched; the addition was covered in aluminum siding. The original house was built not of sandstone but of limestone, because that was what the earth yielded here, near the Chester County line.

When he and Elsie kissed good-night, again there was not that melting together, though he took the liberty of stroking a breast as she leaned toward him getting out of the car. Owen felt he had failed but no one could take from him his stolen treasure, how far Elsie had “gone,” leaving him with a kind of home movie his mind could run and rerun in a rickety projector, not just in bed but in inward moments of daylight, flickering bits and pieces of her—her shampoo, her heartbeat like a stranger knocking on the other side of a door, the surprising elastic give and stretch of her waist.