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them squabbling for days, the mist thickens and forces him to pay attention to the road.
    Sherrie fishes for a cassette and pops it into the tape deck. Wake me, shake me, don’t let me sleep too long . The Dixie Hummingbirds. Terrific. So much for peaceful silence. Sherrie’s been listening to gospel, which normally Swenson likes. This summer, driving the country roads, he’d turned up the sound and filled the car with glorious voices auditioning for the angel chorus.
    Now he says, “I hate this song. It makes me want to pull off the road and kneel down in the drainage ditch and accept Jesus as my personal savior. Plus it makes me envy those lucky fuckers who believe it.”
    â€œHey.” Sherrie holds up her hand. “Don’t blame me. All I did was put on some music.”
    Wake me? Shake me? Are the Dixie Hummingbirds really worried about sleeping through the Last Judgment? Here on earth, Swenson and Sherrie balance on the point between hellish recriminations and the purgatorial silence that passes for friendly camaraderie.
    Sherrie switches off the tape.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Swenson says. “You can listen to it if you want.”
    â€œThat’s okay,” says Sherrie. “You’ve been through enough for one day.”
    â€œI love you,” says Swenson. “You know that?”
    â€œMe you too,” says Sherrie.

 
    S wenson dreams that his daughter, Ruby, has called to say she’s thinking of him and everything’s forgiven. Struggling awake, he’s snapped into the harsh bright morning, which greets him with three unpleasant facts, more or less at once.
    One: the phone is ringing.
    Two: it isn’t Ruby, who hasn’t called since she went away to college. She’ll consent to talk to him if he phones her dorm at State, though talk is hardly the word for her murmurs and grunts, each one an eloquent expression of the rage that’s been brewing since she was a high school senior and Swenson—stupidly—broke up her first real infatuation with arguably the sleaziest student in Euston College history.
    Three: he seems to have spent the night on the living room couch.
    Why doesn’t someone answer the phone? Where the hell is Sherrie? It’s probably Sherrie calling to explain why he’s on the sofa. He’d know if they’d had an argument. Besides which, they never go to sleep without making up or at least pretending, though the embers may reignite first thing in the morning. Why didn’t Sherrie wake him and make him come to bed? It’s lucky the phone stops ringing before he’s able to move. If it is Sherrie, he just might have to ask her why the hell she left him here. Once the phone stops insisting, he eases himself off the couch. He’ll call Sherrie back when he gets a chance. But wait. She has to be in the house. He’s got the only car.
    â€œSherrie?” he cries. Something’s terribly wrong. Sudden death would certainly explain her leaving him on the couch. “Sherrie!” He can’t live without her!
    He rushes instinctively toward the sun streaming in from the kitchen. Glowing in the center of light is a sheet of white paper. A note from Sherrie, obviously, on the kitchen table.
    â€œYou looked tired. I let you sleep in. Arlene gave me a ride. Much love, S.”
    Poor Sherrie! Married to a lunatic convinced she’d abandoned him when she was only trying to let him get some shut-eye. Sherrie loves him. She signed her note: Much love.
    Clutching the note, he drifts over to the window. Installing it was their second and final attempt to make the old Vermont farmhouse satisfy their needs or just acknowledge their existence. Mostly they’ve settled in and let the house do what it wants. Although (or perhaps because) they told the hippie carpenter not to make it look like a bay window in a tract home, it looks exactly like a bay window in a tract home. So what. The window does