hind legs, first one side, then the other, grunting in some kind of dog ecstasy.
Wonderful, Rachel said, and Danny said, I’ll dry him when I get back. I gotta go help Jeff. His battery is dead.
Did you get it all off at least? she said, and he flinched, as if she’d shouted.
What? he said.
Rachel gestured at the dog. Did you get it all off?
I got it all off, he said, and turned and was gone again. Nineteen and free to do as he pleased, including, apparently, drinking. There were places they could get into, he and Jeff Goss, and some mornings she smelled the bar on him like he’d slept on its floor. Other mornings she smelled strawberries and knew that Katie Goss, Jeff’s younger sister, had been in the house. Rachel did not approve of such things, of course . . . but then she’d remember the night she heard them laughing behind his door and she could smell the strawberries and she’d been so angry she rapped on the door and hissed that it was late and he was going to wake up his brother, and the laughing stopped and the bed squeaked and to her horror the door swung open and there he stood, with his smile, fully clothed. Beyond him, on the bed, sat Katie Goss and Marky, smiling at her too, holding their hands of playing cards. Ma, said Danny, come in, we need a fourth. Yeah Momma come in we need a fourth! cried Marky. Plenty of room up here, said Katie Goss. And there they’d sat on the little bed playing cards until one in the morning, when finally she’d gotten Marky to go back to his room, and Danny had driven Katie home to her parents.
He would test her in some way, Danny would, and then he’d fill her heart with love. He’d been taking classes at the college then—engineering! Bridges and dams!—and he could’ve moved out, he had a good job with Gordon Burke, but he was staying home to save money, he’d said, and that was fine. He could call it whatever he wanted; she knew it was for his brother. She knew he’d stayed home for Marky.
5
There was the direct way home, across the new concrete bridge—or new fifteen years ago, when the county had finally rebuilt it—but Gordon drove past the turnoff and kept going south, to Old Highway 20, so he could get the engine heated all the way up; the cab was closed off from the back of the van and would warm up fast, but frost was climbing the inside of the windshield, and when he put his bare fingers to the vent the air was no warmer than his fingers.
He hit the Old Highway 20 bridge doing fifty and he would not think of the other bridge, the new concrete bridge, upriver. Although it wasn’t the bridge, it was the river that ran beneath it, which was the same river wherever you crossed it and wherever you looked at it and wherever you went into it.
From the county road you could see the light of his front porch, the sixty-watt bulb blinking a Morse code in the passing pinewoods, and he took the winding drive through the trees and pulled up to the outbuilding and put the van in park, then sat there with the engine running, the air blowing. The cab warmer now but not warm enough by far.
He hauled up the bay door and got back in the van and pulled in behind the old tractor plow and killed the engine, then he popped the hood and got out again and stood staring at the engine in the dark. He stood there a long time, no sound but the ticking of the engine block and his own breathing, before he dropped the hood and hauled down the bay door, booted home the side latches, and crossed the clearing to the house, his bootsoles on the shoveled path so loud in the cold, in the stillness of the woods.
He got his fire going, then clattered a frozen pizza into the oven and sat down at the kitchen table to go over his receipts and his appointments for the rest of the week, and he did not look up again until he smelled something burning—forgot to set the timer, Jesus Christ . . . and he carried the blackened pizza still smoking on the cookie sheet to the front porch and shucked it into