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there with my mother and collect snow and we’d study it with magnifying glasses.” Still she did not look up. Snow pressed at the shop window. “I’ve never been with anyone, you know. I don’t even have any friends, not really.”
    â€œI know, David.”
    â€œI’ve hardly even left Anchorage.”
    She nodded and braced both hands around her cup.
    â€œI applied for jobs last week,” he said. “All over the country.”
    She spoke to her coffee. “What if I hadn’t been in that grocery store? What if I had decided to go two hours earlier? Or two minutes?”
    â€œWe can leave, Sandy.”
    â€œDavid.” Her boots squeaked beneath the table. “I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve been married for fifteen and a half years.”
    Bells slung over the door handle jangled and two men came in and stamped snow from their shoes. Winkler’s eyeballs were starting to throb. Fifteen and a half years was incontestable, a continent he’d never visit, a staircase he’d never climb. “The supermarket,” he was saying. “We met in the supermarket.”
    She stopped showing up at the bank. She did not pick up the phone at her house. He’d dial her number all day and in the evenings Herman Sheeler would answer with an enthused, half-shouted “Hello?” and Winkler, across town, cringing in his apartment, would gently hang up.
    He trolled Marilyn Street. Wind rolled in from the inlet, cold and salty.
    Rain, and more rain. All day the ground snow melted and all night it froze. Winter broke, and solidified, and broke again. Out in the hills, moose were stirring, and foxes, and bears. Fiddleheads were nudging up. Birds coursed in from their southern fields. Winkler lay in his little bed after midnight and burned.
    At a welding supply store he compiled a starter kit: a Clarke arc welder; a wire brush; tin snips; a chipping hammer; welder’s gloves, apron, and helmet; spools of steel, aluminum, and copper wire; brazing alloys in little tubes; electrodes; soldering lugs. The clerk piled it all into a leftover television box and at noon on a Tuesday, Winkler drove to Sandy’s house, parked in the driveway, took the box in his arms, went up the front walk, and banged the knocker.
    He knocked three times, four times. He waited. Maybe Herman had put her on a plane for Phoenix or Vancouver with instructions never to come back again. Maybe she was across town right then gettingan abortion. Winkler trembled. He knelt on the porch and pushed open the mail slot. “Sandy!” he called, and waited. “I love you, Sandy! I love you!”
    He got in the Newport, drove south, circled the city lakes: Connors and DeLong, Sand, Jewel, and Campbell. Forty minutes later he pulled down Marilyn past her house and the box was gone from the front porch.
    Baltimore, Honolulu, and Salt Lake said no, but Cleveland said yes, handed down an offer: staff meteorologist for a television network, a salary, benefits, a stipend to pay for moving.
    He drove to Sandy’s and pulled into the driveway and sat a minute trying to calm his heart. It was Saturday. Herman answered the door. He was the gray-haired one: the one with the key ring permanently clipped to his belt loop. Gray-haired at thirty-five. “Hello,” Herman said, as if he were answering the phone. Over his shoulder Winkler could just see into the hall, maple paneling, a gold-framed watercolor of a trout at the end. “Can I help you?”
    Winkler adjusted his glasses. It was clear in a half second: Herman had no clue. Winkler said, “I’m looking for Sandy Sheeler? The metal artist?”
    Herman blinked and frowned and said, “My wife?” He turned and called, “Sandy!” back into the house.
    She came into the hall wiping her hands on a towel. Her face blanched.
    â€œHe’s looking for a metal artist?” Herman asked. “With your