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“I must have been crazy to go to sleep in this heat. I feel like I'd been knocked down with a wooden mallet. Sit down, Dad. I think there's some beer in the icebox.”
    He looked older than the last time I had seen him, which had been only a day or two before, and very tired. He smiled faintly, dropped into a cane-bottomed chair, and carefully placed his black satchel on the floor.
    “Yes. I think* a beer might taste good.”
    I went to the kitchen and washed my face at the sink, then got the beers out of the icebox and brought them in. I dropped on the bed again and for one quiet moment we drank from the sweating cans. I was used to having my father drop in on me like this, every time he had a call out this way. He was the finest man I ever knew— and the only man in the world that I cared a damn about. We never said much. Usually it was just like this, sitting, drinking a beer together, and then he'd leave. I had a feeling, though, that today was going to be different.
    “You been out to the Jarvis farm again?” I asked firmly.
    He shrugged and smiled that small smile. “The McClellans, this time. The youngest boy stepped on a nail. Luckily, he had been vaccinated for tetanus.”
    “Why,” I asked, “do you keep fooling with these hard-scrabble farmers, Dad? You'll never get your pay, and you know it. You could have a fine practice in town, be making plenty of money, if you'd stay in your office where people could find you.”
    He glanced at me, then away. “People in the country need doctors too. Besides, it's a little late for me to start making money, isn't it?”
    “You could think about your health. It's not too late for that, but it will be pretty soon, if you keep making these farm calls at all hours.”
    We'd been over it a thousand times and had never found a meeting place. Maybe I would have been a doctor, the way he had wanted, if I could have seen any future in it when I was younger. But getting up at all hours of the night, when you're dead tired, and going out to the very end of God's nowhere to help some farmer's wife have her tenth kid was not my idea of a way to live.
    “Joe ...” I looked up, almost forgetting that he was still sitting there. He cleared his throat and looked down at his lean, white hands. “Joe, I had a talk with Beth's father yesterday.”
    “Steve Langford?” I knew what he was thinking. I didn't want to talk about it. It was the last thing I wanted to discuss right now, with Paula Sheldon whirling in my mind, but I couldn't think of any way to stop it. “What did Langford have to talk about—that front yard of his?” I laughed. “You'd think it was his life's work, the time he puts on it.”
    “No.” He still looked at his hands. “He talked about you, Joe, and about Beth.”
    “I know,” I said, trying hard to keep a hold on my anger. “Langford wants to know if Beth and I have set the date yet. Well, I've got news for Langford. There's not going to be any date. What a hell of a town this is! Go out with a girl a few times and they've got you as good as married!”
    I had plenty more to say. I was getting damn tired of people like Steve Langford butting in on my business. But I left them   unsaid, the things that were in my mind. I had no wish to hurt my father, the one man in the world that I liked. I guess he figured, like Langford, that someday I would marry a home-town girl and settle down to rot the rest of my life away in Creston. Well, he was mistaken about that; they all were mistaken.
    But the look of disappointment in my father's eyes shook me. I suddenly realized how old he was, and tired, and finally I said: “I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk it over with Beth.”
    He smiled, very faintly. “All right, Joe. Whatever you say.” Then he reached for his satchel and stood up. We said the usual small things, and after a while he was gone.
    I was late, as usual, when I got around to the Langford place that night, and as usual Steve Langford was