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She and Cub used to come up here by themselves in those days, too, for so-called picnics But not once since Cordie and Preston were born It was crazy to suggest the turkey blind on the faht, words fro up dirt, words froo? Her own bedrooed Barbie lying there staring while a person tried to get in the has a pitiful place to begin with, before you even started deducting the wages of sin Mike Bush at the counter would greet her by name: How do, Mrs Turnbo’s the suddenly, blocked with branches The upper part of a fallen tree lay across it, so i between sideways limbs with clah this, or would the wall of branches turn hi this one sweet chance Once she’d passed through, she considered waiting But he knew the way He said he’d hunted froo With his own friends, no one she or Cub knew Younger, his friends would be

She srit and viewed the corpse of the fallen monster The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind What a waste After round, the wide fist of its root ash in the wooded mountainside Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life After soall over the county, she’d seen it in the paper, e a faround took water until it was nothing but soft sponge, and the trees fell out of it Near Great Lick a whole hillside ofa landslide of splintered trunks, rock and rill People were shocked, even men like her father-in-laho tended toalready to have seen everything in creation But they’d never seen this, and had coe tis and would thus take note of a lie

The road turned up steeply toward the ridge and petered out to a single track A et abehind her ht look athletic, but in truth her feet ss New boots There was one enuine calfskin, dark lossy pointed toes, so beautiful she’d nearly cried when she found the decent for Preston to wear to kindergarten The boots were six dollars, in like-new condition, the soles barely scuffed Someone in the world had such a life, they could take one little walk in expensive new boots and then pitch them out, just because The boots weren’t a perfect fit but they looked good on, so she bought the hygiene products Or cigarettes, which she surely did not count She’d kept the boots hidden fro of her own In the norot snatched from her hands: her hairbrush, the TV clicker, the soft middle part of her sandwich, the last Coke she’d waited all afternoon to open She’d once had a drea the hair from her head in sheaves to make their red nests

Not that Cub would notice if she wore these boots, and not that she’d had occasion So why put the to walk up alike dark fish scales to the tooled leather halfway up her calves This day had played in her head like a movie on round-the-clock reruns, that’s why With an undere in and out of a scene that s she had in abundance The price was right She thought about the kissing mostly, when she sat down to , setting and wardrobe This ht be a difference in how ht Clothes: present or absent The calfskin boots were a part of it, as were the suede jacket borrowed from her best friend Dovey and the red chenille scarf around her neck, things he would slowly take off of her She’d pictured it being cold like this, too Her flyaway thoughts had not blurred out the inconveniences altogether Her flushed cheeks, his ware hair at her temples, all these were part and parcel She’d pulled on the boots thisas if she’d received written instructions

And now she was in deep, though there had been no hanging offenses as yet They’d ether for about ten seconds at a ti around the corner from where her car was parked with the kids buckled up inside, arguing at full volume If I can still hear theht conducive to romance Yet the anticipation of hilass of a beer bottle, and his face full of dirin that see her face in both his hands, dear God Looking her in the eyes, rubbing the ends of her hair between his thu ht her to sit on the closet floor and talk stupid with hiht, while her family slept under sweet closed eyelids As she whispered in the dark, her husband’s work shirts on their hangers idly stroked the top of her head, almost the same way Cub himself did when she sat on the floor with the baby while he occupied the whole couch, watching TV Oblivious to the storentleness was ar a wife should bear without complaint But it made him seem dumb as a cow and it made her mad All of it The way he let hishim clean his plate and tuck in his shirttails like a two-hundred-pound child The embarrassment of his name He could be Burley Junior if he’d claim it, but instead let his parents and the populace of a county call him Cubby as if he were still a boy, while they hailed his father, the elder Burley Turnbow, as "Bear" A cub should grow up, but at twenty-eight years of age, this one stood long-faced and slu a sheaf of blond bangs out of his eyes Noould let himself be shamed by his wife’s hardheartedness too, or fail to notice it Why should he keep on loving her so much?