So Phyllis Goodhue was not his first love interest, though it must be admitted that even for the innocent ’fifties Owen was an innocent. Having been taken too deep into the woods by Elsie, he saw sex as something to be deferred until he had made space for it and didn’t feel squeezed. His freshman year had been squeezed by his efforts not to fail and fall back into the farmland and his disconsolate family. At home, his grandmother, crippled by Parkinson’s disease, stayed more and more upstairs in bed; when he would visit her she would hold out her clawlike blue hands to him and say, “Up. Up.” Grammy had always been active and didn’t want to stop exercising. Owen would gamely pull her up, and then let her down, her head in the wild disorder of its thinned white hair lowering to the pillow, and pull her up again, until he impatiently wearied. Downstairs, his grandfather spent hours sitting at one end of the old caneback sofa reading the Bible. When a car passed on the lonely road outside, he lifted his head as if sniffing, in hopes that it would be the mailman, who never brought him any mail but the Alton morning paper, already out of date, and dues and notices from the Masonic lodge in Willow, of which he had been a member in his prime, a new arrival in town and a significant local investor. Last summer, his daughter had driven him into Willow for the Saturday funeral of his last old friend from those prosperous days; both of them, father and daughter, had come back with tears in their eyes, Owen was startled to see—jewel-like trophies from the world of “for keeps,” where shots rang out and panicked horses ran back into their burning stables and the second law of thermodynamics refused all reversals into a condition of lesser disorder.