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demeanor with which she usually greeted her husband when she was mad at him. Instead she rolled the window down and blurted out the fear that was uppermost in her mind.
    “Duane, if you wanted a divorce why didn’t you just say so?” she asked, when he stopped. “Why did you have to scare us all this way?”
    “What are you talking about, honey?” he asked. “I don’t want a divorce.”
    Karla was flooded with relief. Her husband seemed to be perfectly sane, and he didn’t want a divorce. But that fact, once she took a moment to consider it, made his behavior all the more puzzling.
    Duane leaned down and looked in the car. Bobby Lee, inscrutable behind his sunglasses, sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.
    “What are you doing here?” Duane asked. “I thought you had a job.”
    “I do, but I shot my toe off,” Bobby Lee remarked, adding no details.
    “Uh-oh,” Duane said. “Target practice at bugs again?”
    Bobby Lee just nodded.
    “Duane, could you please get in, I’ve had a hectic day,” Karla said. “Earlene fainted at the sight of Bobby’s toe and when she came to she fell and split her head open on the watercooler, and then Ruth got her feet wet and so on.”
    She paused. “Just get in and let’s go home,” she said.
    “But I am nearly home,” Duane said. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
    “Duane, I wish you wouldn’t be stubborn over this,” Karla said. “Just get in the car. You’ve already embarrassed me enough, walking around all day.”
    “I don’t want to get in,” Duane said pleasantly. “I’m enjoying my walk.”
    “Well, good for you, nobody else is enjoying themselves much today,” Karla said. “Get in just this once and we’ll talk about it later.”
    “I don’t think there’s much to talk about,” Duane said. “Walking is a normal activity—anybody with two good legs can do it. It’s also good for your health—lowers the risk of heart attacks and strokes.”
    “It doesn’t lower the risk for me,” Karla pointed out. “I could get a stroke right now just from being mad at you.”
    “Why would you be mad at me for taking steps to improve my health?” Duane asked. “Isn’t this better than having me keel over in the cab of a pickup somewhere?”
    Karla considered those remarks for a while.
    “It’s just like you to try and make something unreasonable sound reasonable,” she said.
    “I’m not the only person in the world who walks,” Duane reminded her. “I’m not even the only person in Thalia. There’s probably four or five women down at the track right now, taking their walks.
    “What I’m doing is a lot healthier than shooting at bugs,” he added, with a glance at Bobby Lee.
    Karla was growing more and more irritated, as she often did when Duane got in one of his reasonable moods. At such times he always seemed able to make what he wanted to do seem completely rational, something everybody else would be doing if they had just thought of it themselves. It was true, for example, that several town women, and even one or two men, could be seen walking in the early mornings, before the day’s work started. But the women who walked were mostly just housewives or secretaries or else retired. Probably the only reason most of them were walking was because they were too tight to buy StairMasters or other machines that would allow them to exercise in their homes. Karla owned several exercise machines herself and would have been happy to buy a few for Duane if he had given her any indication that he felt the need for exercise.
    “Duane, there’s plenty of ways you could exercise at home without upsetting everybody and making them think you’ve lost your mind,” Karla said, but when she looked up to see what response he would make she discovered that she was just floating words out an open window; Duane had continued on down the road—she could see his retreating back in her rearview mirror.
    “What