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laughed nervously. “Just a little harmless horseplay. We’re terribly sorry.”
    At that, the other man’s height appeared to increase as he assessed Devlin. The stranger shifted his toothpick, sucked air through his teeth then reduced Devlin to a waste of his time and turned away.
    In the car, Devlin smarted from the incident but tried to conceal it as he struggled to replace the tiny bulb in the parking lot. He exaggerated his concentration, giving significance to an insignificant task. His sweating fingers lost their grip and he lost the bulb under his seat.
    “Can we just go Dad?” Blake asked.
    Driving home, Devlin found his son’s face in the rear view mirror and the sting of shame for having let him down.
    “You have to understand something, son.”
    Blake watched strip malls roll by.
    “Non-violence is the best way to handle these situations.”
    Blake said nothing.
    “It’s just wise to back off. Because you never know how these things are going to go. You just never --”
    “It’s all right, Dad.”
    And with those words and with his tone, Devlin’s nine-year-old boy had passed judgement on him. Devlin was guilty of a monumental failing. He had been tested and shown to be a father incapable of defending his son.
    At dinner that evening, Blake never revealed to his mother and his older sister what had happened. Neither did Devlin. It was not mentioned in the morning when they packed their Ford before setting off for their family vacation to the lake in eastern New Brunswick.
    But it was all Devlin could think about.
    It weighed on him as they drove through the rolling hills and low rugged highlands that straddled the border with Maine. They dropped the windows and cracked the sunroof. Elise, his wife, was barefoot, wearing shorts, a summer top and sunglasses. Her hair flowed in the breezes. Annie, their daughter, was listening to CDs and snapping through Wired magazine. Blake took in the countryside blinking thoughtfully at the forests.
    Watching him, it dawned on Devlin that Blake’s reaction to the kid in the store was heroic. That in a split second he’d made a clear, morally justified choice to defend himself. Something he’d lacked the courage to do. But Blake was a boy, hardly mature enough to fathom the consequences, or appreciate the ramifications of a conflict. At least that’s how Devlin tried to rationalize it as the miles passed.
    They navigated the route to their rented cabin from the crudely sketched map the manager had faxed. After they got off the highway, Elise identified the landmarks. “There’s the red-roofed barn, turn left there.” They drove along a ribbon of pavement that wound through rolling fields and pastures creased by streams with railroad tie bridges.
    It wasn’t long before it narrowed into a twisting hilly dirt road, darkened by the thick cool sweet-smelling forests of cedar, pine, hemlock, butternut, maple, tamarack and birch. Under a quilt of light and shadow, the trees hid sudden peaks and valleys that hugged small cliff edges. It was beautiful, Devlin thought, loving the winding, undulating road. Annie and Blake were awed, as if they were penetrating a lost world. True to the map, after some forty-five minutes they arrived at a hamlet made up of a few buildings clustered around a sleepy four-corner stop with a blinking yellow light.
    The Crossroads, the hand-painted sign read.
    It had a small mall with a restaurant, a postal outlet, a one-pump gas station, and Pride’s General Store with a fat drowsy dog nearly asleep on its front porch.
    “Pride’s. That’s where we pick up the key to our cabin,” Elise said.
    “Place looks like a ghost town.” Devlin parked.
    The planks of the porch creaked and the dog raised its eyebrows to greet them as they entered. Elise bought a few groceries and snacks while Devlin showed the teenage clerk his driver’s license. She produced a small envelope from the till. It contained a single bronze key with “Number 7,”