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healing process he had slept restlessly, getting up and down several times in the night, tiptoeing ponderously, tripping over his feet or the crutches because he didn’t want to waken her with the lights. She’d moved herself into the little room so he could get up and down all he liked without worrying about waking her. He had been sleeping better as a result, the healing was progressing, and she was looking forward to their reunion. The temporary room was merely utilitarian, though the bookshelves held a few of her favorite photographs: Stace as a baby, toddler, child, adolescent; Hal and his boys, her stepsons, at various times in their lives; her friends in the Decline and Fall Club, when they were young and when they weren’t so young.
    â€œWhere’s Dad?” Stace asked, seating herself in the wicker rocker.
    Carolyn answered from the bathroom door. “Your uncle Tim picked him up and took him down to Albuquerque. He’ll spend a night with his brother and have X rays in the morning. He’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”
    â€œHow’s his leg doing?”
    â€œFor a man of his age, as well as can be expected. Actually, he is better. He’s almost quit being grouchy.”
    â€œDad? I didn’t know he was ever grouchy.”
    Carolyn went into the bathroom and shut the door. Hal’s grouchiness was unusual. Carolyn could remember his being so only twice in almost forty years. The first time had been her senior year in college, Christmas of sixty-two, when he’d called her, told her he had to tell her something important, and she’d agreed to meet him for supper.
    The first thing he told her was that his wife had died. She still squirmed with discomfort when she remembered how hard it had been not to seem pleased at that news. She’d bitten her tongue in the effort. “I’m sorry,” she’d said at last, evoking a sympathetic image of Hal’s wife, making herself mean it. She was sorry. She had liked Hal’s wife. Envied, but liked.
    It was he who had smiled, rather ruefully. “I loved her dearly, Carolyn. She wasn’t sick, she wasn’t weak, she had ananeurysm no one knew about, it burst and she died. Just like that. And I got angry and yelled, and grieved, and did all the things people do, and when I got over it and started thinking about female company again, I remembered you.…”
    â€œHow did you know where to find me?”
    â€œWell, I asked Albert.”
    And that was when he’d become definitely grouchy, when he’d taken her hand firmly in his own, leaned across the table, and told her what vicious, unforgivable thing Albert had done. Yes, Hal had been grouchy, but no more so than Carolyn.
    â€œIs he a total fool?” she had half screamed, making other diners look up and stare.
    â€œYes,” Hal had said softly, making a shushing gesture. “And I’m so glad you decided not to marry Albert.”
    He could have been no gladder than she! She stripped off the dirty jeans and draped them across the laundry hamper, washed off the worst of the barn dirt, and wrapped herself in a soft, shabby old robe before returning to the bedroom to sit before the mirror. The robe was brown hopsacking, and her hair streamed across it in a gray mane, affirming Stace’s opinion. She did look like a witch.
    She reached for her comb. “What brought you out this way?”
    Stace answered with an untypical silence, a diffident glance at her own reflection, as though to see whether her face was clean. Stace had inherited Hal’s good looks and was always handsome so far as Carolyn was concerned, even when she was nose wriggling, lip twisting, eye slitting, as she was now. Stace flushed at Carolyn’s scrutiny and turned away, running her fingers through her short bright hair, making it stand untidily on end.
    â€œWhat?” Carolyn demanded, suddenly apprehensive.
    Stace shuddered, drew in a