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“But then what,” said Thea. “Then what.”

“And they say the first time might not be that great.”

“I've heard that, too.”

“Maybe you could skip the first time and go right to the second time.”

“Or you'll know when the time is right,” said Thea. “Which
sounds good, but I'm not sure that you would know. Or the time might be right for one person when, for the other person, umm, actually, the time could be better.”

“You can't overthink it.”

“Would you kiss me?” said Thea.

“If the time was right.”

She laughed and threw a pillow at him.

“Are you out of your mind?” she said. “I don't want you to kiss me.”

After a while Charlotte came over and picked up Thea and Micah, and they headed for Micah's house to play volleyball on the new court.

On the way they saw a Phamish truck parked on the street. They stood in line on the sidewalk beside an old movie theater with faded red letters stuck randomly on the marquee.

They got banh mi sandwiches and sat on the tailgate of Charlotte's pickup eating in the shade of a tree that grew from a hole in the sidewalk.

Micah said he liked how you could go places in Los Angeles and find good food for a few dollars and you didn't have to sit around waiting for it and they handed it out the window of a truck.

“Micah hates forks and plates,” said Thea.

“This is Los Angeles,” said Charlotte.

They played volleyball till the sun went down. The lines Joan had made in the grass glowed brighter and brighter in the dark. Then it got too cold and they went into the house, where Joan had laid out food on the dining room table. They loaded their plates and ate in the TV room. There was a fire in the fireplace and the television played a football game with the sound turned down.

Rob talked of the old days of the Los Angeles Rams when they played at the Coliseum with a bunch of players none of the others had heard of. But the names had a legendary sound and Joan and the teenagers listened and understood a little of what those days meant to him.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

I
FEEL LIKE
I could talk all night,” said Louise. “I feel like having some grapes. Would you like some grapes?”

“What?” said Dan.

“Would you like some grapes?”

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to three,” Louise said. “I took cold medicine.”

Dan sat up. “If we're going to have grapes, I would have a grilled cheese sandwich.”

They put on their robes and tied them tight against the cold and Louise followed Dan down the stairs with her hands on his shoulders, steering his sleepy body.

Louise paused on the landing. “Do you know how it is when you're awake, and you try to wake the other person up, but you
know they're not going to? And you're alone in the world with your nighttime worries and the morning far away.”

Dan reached back and laid his hand on top of hers and they
continued down the stairs.

He turned on the counter light and stood motionless for a
moment, then took a loaf of bread from the cupboard and Swiss cheese and mustard from the refrigerator.

“Would you like a grilled cheese?”

“That's okay,” said Louise.

She sat at the table picking green grapes from a wooden bowl.

Dan heated a square black skillet and put the sandwich on and covered it with the lid of a saucepan. He stood by the windows running water into a glass.

“Are you seeing this?” he said.

She had been looking at him but only then did she notice the giant snowflakes sliding like paper against the glass.

“Do you remember how you would have to go out on nights like this?”

“I do.”

“There's a three-car pileup. A fire. A domestic,” said Louise. “You'd better flip your sandwich, love.”

Dan lifted the lid and turned the sandwich over. He knit his fingers behind his neck and yawned. He had an extreme yawn, like that of a TV lion on the veldt.

“And you'd go out in your nightgown and boots to warm up the cruiser,” he said.

She put a grape in her mouth and sliced it clean down the middle with her front teeth. “I did, didn't I? Sometimes I did.”

Dan sliced the grilled cheese on the diagonal and brought it to the table. He missed a little more of his sideburns every time he shaved and was beginning to look like someone in a Western.

“What are your nighttime worries?” he said.

“There's so many,” she said. “That I haven't been kind. That there's a meanness in me. That we will die.”

“The last part is the only true one.”

“Do you look at the obituaries? People are living older and older, but they're also dying younger and younger.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Then we'll be done, and they'll sell our house, and it will be like we were never here. I think of the people that will buy our house. I can see them walking from room to room, thinking ‘Oh, we can do way better than those other people did.' You know, like everyone does when they look at a house. Do you worry about that?”

“Not till you said it,” said Dan. “We probably have thirty years anyway. Maybe more. I could see us being really old. Think how many things will happen in that time.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. People going to the moon on vacation.”

“Would you go the moon? I don't think I would.”

“Well, if they fixed it up a little bit.”

“I think I'm bothering Lyris and Albert.”

“Did they say that?”

“No.”

“I think they would. They're not shy people.”

“They are, though,” said Louise. “You don't know them like I do. One night I got mixed up and said I was her mother.”

“I wouldn't fault you for that.”

“I just wish we had our girl,” whispered Louise.

Dan nodded, breathing quietly.

“Then she could have the house. And she could be running through it, and someday her kids could be running through it. And we would say, ‘Slow down, you're going to hurt yourself.'”

She laid her head on her arms.

“This is what the night does,” she said. “Puts sad things in your mind.”

Reading the newspaper one day Tiny Darling happened on an article about a man who got caught trying to rob the Big Wonder store in Morrisville.

Big Wonder had come in ten years ago, one of the land-eating flat stores that killed off town businesses for miles around. No one who worked there seemed to have the least idea of what was in the store, how it worked, or where to find it. They wandered around in green smocks trying to avoid contact with customers.

The robber's plan was clever up to a point. He hid in an expedition tent in the sporting goods pavilion until the middle of the night. Police said he picked up a
Field & Stream
magazine in the store that he read to while away the hours. Then he came out of the tent and crawled to the video counter.

Tiny doubted that part. It would be an absurdly long crawl. Two guards caught the man and held him at gunpoint till the cops came. What fun it must have been for the guards to pull their guns. They were going to get a plaque for their good service.

The thief had approached the problem from the wrong perspective. He'd fixated on getting into the store after hours, when the more important question was how to get out.

And so Tiny drove over to Morrisville one night. Big Wonder was on the south side of Highway 56 with an open field behind it and beyond that a housing development called The Foxglove.

Tiny parked on the edge of The Foxglove and surveyed the back of Big Wonder through binoculars. It was a mental exercise. He had nothing else to do with Micah gone. Moonlight glittered on the snow in the field. Tiny ran the car and listened to music on the radio.

A Big Wonder semi arrived at the loading dock around midnight. The truck took an hour to unload and leave. Then came a period of twenty minutes or so when the doors of the loading dock were open as night workers moved boxes around and came to the doorway every once in a while to smoke.

On the same night of the following week, Tiny returned. Once again the semi came, unloaded its cargo, and left. Tiny got out of his car and crossed the field, boots breaking crusted snow. It was a long walk. When he reached the loading bay, he picked up a large cardboard box, a wide-screen TV.

He walked back across the field, slid the TV into the backseat of the car, and got in the front. He took his gloves off and blew on his hands. From the dashboard he took a red Marks-A-Lot, uncapped it with his teeth, and wrote on the top of the box:

HEH, HEH

Then he drove out of The Foxglove, back to the highway, and around to the parking lot of Big Wonder. He stopped near the front doors, pulled the boxed TV from the backseat, leaned it against the glass, and drove home, where he made himself a drink.

To Tiny's surprise, his experimental raid on the flat store made the newspaper.

“We believe that the subject may have been laughing at the store, or possibly its security apparatus,” said a Morrisville police lieutenant.

Tiny took the newspaper in both hands and gave it a shake. How he admired this lieutenant and his subtle criticism of Big Wonder.

The police did not think that the thief's initials were H.E.H., because there would be no reason to repeat them with a comma between.

Asked if the thief might fairly be called “the Laughing Bandit,” the lieutenant said, “It's a free press. Call him whatever you want.”

A blue van with tinted windows arrived one morning as Dan ­Norman cleared snow from the driveway at the farmhouse. He had an old orange Kubota with a front-end loader and four-foot scoop.

It was more tractor than you'd need for a driveway but he liked driving it because it reminded him of a tractor that the old farmer Henry Hamilton used to have, when there was a farm across the road and Henry lived on it. Dan would go into town and clear Louise's mother's driveway too.

Dan took the tractor out of gear, stepped on the brake, climbed down, and walked up the driveway through the drifts. The wind came up the hill from the south. His ears were warm in a wool Jones hat with the flaps down.

A man and a woman sat in the van wearing overcoats buttoned to the neck. The man rolled down the window.

“Morning,” said Dan.

“Are you Dan Norman?”

He nodded.

“You know a man named Jack Snow?”

“Know of him. Who are you?”

“I'm Agent Sam Anders. This is Agent Betty Lee. We're with the federal government.”

“It's good to have work these days.”

The woman leaned toward the window. “How about you get in the vehicle and we go for a ride.”

“I've got to finish plowing.”

“We can wait.”

“Well, yeah, but you'll have to move.”

“I'll pull in,” said the man.

“Ah, I don't know about that. It's pretty deep.”

“This is four-wheel drive.”

Agent Anders drove the van into snow up to the wheel wells and got stuck. Dan plowed a path to the van and hooked a chain on the chassis and pulled it out. He finished the driveway and waved for the agents to come into the house, where they sat in the kitchen while he made coffee.

“We want you to back off Jack Snow,” said Agent Lee.

“I already have,” said Dan. “That's done.”

“What was it?”

“A family thing,” said Dan.

“Wendy,” said Agent Anders.

“We're not interested in Wendy,” said Agent Lee. “We're investigating art theft. I'm from Justice, Sam's from Revenue. We've been observing Jack Snow since fall.”

“That's how we know you were tailing him.”

“Where were you?” said Dan.

“In the trainyard. A car on the siding.”

“Isn't it cold?”

“We have a kerosene heater.”

“They only do so much.”

“Jack Snow is a small thing attached to a big thing. He's an associate of Andy from Omaha.”

“He's the one you want.”

“No. Andy's in Lons Ferry and will be for a long time. That's where he met Snow.”

“We want his friends.”

“I don't see where I can be of much use,” said Dan. “Far as I know, Jack Snow's just fooling around with copies. Eating away at the metal. More of a hobby than a crime.”

“That's what he thinks. But he's about to get something real. Then we'll have him.”

“What is it?”

“It's a stone. Found in a bronze case in a bog in Ireland. A guy had it in his hands. They say he'd been dead a thousand years.”

“How'd you come by it?” said Dan.

“We've never had it,” said Agent Lee. “We're tracking it.”

“And we're running out of time,” said her partner.

Sandra Zulma took the county transit bus that ran from Stone City to Romyla along Highway 41. Besides herself on the bus there was an old couple with a small red and white dog in a green knitted sweater that sat looking out the window.

The highway went along the ridge and she could see the fields and the bare trees and the low places where water had pooled and frozen. It would not snow today.

Seeing the ranch house on the hill, Sandra pulled the cord to get off. A bell rang, the driver looked at her in the mirror, and she walked to the front of the bus holding the chrome rail. She lowered her head and pointed to the house.

Sandra got off the bus and walked up a long driveway banked high with snow. Her clothes were not suited to open country. She wore a wool suit jacket with the sleeves pulled down over her hands. She rapped on the storm door, and the glass bowed with a reflection of the bright and snowy yard.

Her cousin Terry came to the door, unshaved and wearing a flannel shirt and green down vest and gray sweatpants.

He'd always made her sad because he had been a smart child but he'd never figured out what to do with knowledge and so now he lived alone in a house with nothing around it.

“I didn't know who to expect, but I got to say it wasn't you,” he said.

“I've come for Jack.”

“Jack who?”

“Snow.”

“Well, he ain't here but come on in.”

Terry made hot chocolate and they carried their mugs into the living room, where heavy orange curtains made a dark warren of the room.

On the big television a figure skater leaped into the air and spun
around and landed with a long and beautiful extension of limbs.

“God damn,” said Terry. “That was a nice double axel. I've been watching this shit, it's really interesting. What do you want with Jack Snow?”

“We've got things to settle.”

Terry found the clicker and turned off the TV. “He come by here about this time last year looking for a place to stay. I couldn't see what he'd ever done for me that I should put him up. Haven't seen him since that time. Well, that's not true, either. I seen him once in a bar, but I didn't go up to him. You know, I never liked the man personally. He's got some deal he runs out of a shed in the trainyard. You want my advice, Sandy, you forget about Jack Snow and go on home. Your mom and dad know where you are?”

Sandra drank her hot chocolate. “Not since I got out of the hospital.”

“Well, I heard you were laid up.”

“I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Everything. I couldn't move. I couldn't eat. I'd go to sleep hoping I would never wake up and that would be best.”

“You didn't mean it though.”

“How you getting by, Terry?”

“Pretty good. I work half the year for Rex Construction. You wouldn't know them. Bridges and buildings and the like. I put a little money aside. This time of year I'm like an old bear. Ain't you got no winter clothes?”