They stood in front of the house, looking at it. There was a shoveled walk and a brick porch. Big windows. Beyond the house, a red barn. Doyle opened the door and took their coats and hung them on wall hooks. Warmth. A living room and a fire. Jack could smell a pot roast.

“Your stuff’s in the upstairs bedroom,” Doyle said. “I put it in the dresser. You can wash your hands, and then we’ll eat. I got one rule: You take care of the dog.”

The dog barked and ran up to Matty.

It was the puppy from the motel. Matty tugged at Jack’s sleeve and got down on his knees. The puppy licked his hand. He looked up at Jack. “Does he have a name?”

“Not yet,” Doyle said. “You’ll have to give him one.”

“I’ll take care of him.”

“Okay.”

“Can he sleep with me?”

“Yeah. He can.”

Jack risked the question, the only one that mattered. “How long can we stay?”

“You can stay as long as you want.”

The woman officer named Midge squatted beside Matty and put her arms around him. “Hello,” she said. “I am so glad to see you.” She would come to visit sometimes, and she brought Matty books and read to him, or she baked bread. In the spring she helped plant a garden. Midge told them things about Doyle and his life. She said that sometimes a person who has survived losing everything builds the hardest shell over the tenderest soul.

There were fields behind the house and streams with brook trout that stood with silver fins raised in the white currents, and sometimes in the fall, deer came down from the hills. The air smelled of wheat. You could sit for a long time and, if you were quiet, you could see one. The gentle eyes, and the head that lifted. The soft ears. Once a doe and a fawn. Jack took Matty there, and sometimes they talked about her and remembered. Other times, Matty ran after the dog, and Jack lay in the field on the grass with his eyes closed and his heart searching. And searching. And he talked to her and he listened, and he didn’t forget.

∞

I broke my promise to Matty.

But I kept it, in a way.

I always come back.

Outside the living-room window, the sky blues bitter and cloudless. Jack undresses and washes with the cloth and pot of water and then bandages his hands again. He gets clean jeans and a gray thermal from the highboy and stands in front of the stove. He is buttoning the jeans when he hears something in the front yard—what sounds like an engine. He pulls the thermal over his head and says to Matty, “Get behind the couch.”

Matty doesn’t move. He stands looking out the window. He speaks in a voice of sheer wonderment.

“It’s a girl.”