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was wrong, I knew this; my earlier elation had ebbed away, leaving me flat and depressed, and I should have left the store at that moment.
    “Anything I can do for you, Mister?” she asked, in her voice the valley’s lilt. For the first time it sounded unfriendly and alien to me.
    “Andy in?” I asked, coming closer to the counter through the massed smells of newness.
    She wordlessly left her chair and disappeared into the cavernous rear of the store. A door closed, then opened again.
    In a moment I saw Andy walking toward me. He had grown fatter and balder, and his pudgy face seemed sexually indeterminate and permanently worried. When he reached thecounter he stopped and leaned against it, creasing his belly. “What can I do you for?” he said, the jokiness of the phrase out of key with his rubbery defeated face and his air of country suspicion. I saw that gray had eaten nearly all of the brown in his fringe of hair. “You’re not one of the drummers. Reps, they call themselves now.”
    “I wanted to come in and say hello,” I said. “I used to come in here with my parents. I’m Eve Updahl’s boy,” using the shorthand that would identify me in the valley.
    He looked at me hard for a moment, then nodded and said, “Miles. You’d be Miles, then. Come back for a visit or just a look-see?” Andy, like his wife, would remember my little errors of judgment of twenty years before.
    “Mostly to work,” I said. “I thought the farm would be a peaceful place to work.” An explanation when I had planned to give none—he was making me defensive.
    “Don’t think I recall what kind of work you wound up doing.”
    “I’m a college teacher,” I said, and the demon of irritation made me take pleasure in his flicker of surprise. “English.”
    “Well, you were always supposed to be brainy,” he said. “Our girl takes shorthand and typing over to the business college in Winona. She’s getting on real good up there. Don’t suppose you teach around here anywhere?”
    I told him the name of my university.
    “That’s back East?”
    “It’s on Long Island.”
    “Eve always said she was afraid you’d wind up back East. So what’s this work you got to do?”
    “I have to write a book—that is, I’m writing a book. On D. H. Lawrence.”
    “Uh-huh. What’s that when it’s at home?”
    I said, “He wrote
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.”
    Andy swung his eyes up to mine with a surprisingly roguish gesture which was somehow girlish at the same time. He looked as though he were about to lick his lips. “I guess it’s true what they say about those colleges out East, huh?” But the remark was not the invitation to masculine revelation that it could have been: there was a sly malice in it.
    “It’s only one of a lot of books he wrote,” I said.
    Again I got the wink of roguishness. “I guess one Book’s good enough for me.” He turned to the side, and I saw his wife lurking in the back of the shop, staring at me. “It’s Miles, Eve’s boy,” he said. “Coulda fooled me. Says he’s here writing a dirty book.”
    She came forward, glowering. “We heard you and your wife got divorced. Duane said.”
    “We were separated,” I said a bit harshly. “Now she’s dead.”
    Surprise showed in both their faces for a second.
    “Guess we didn’t hear that,” said Andy’s wife. “Was there something you wanted?”
    “Maybe I’ll pick up a case of beer for Duane. What kind does he drink?”
    “If it’s beer he’ll drink it,” said Andy. “Blatz, Schlitz or Old Milwaukee? I guess we got some Bud around here too.”
    “Any one,” I said, and Andy lumbered away to the back room where he kept his stacked cases of beer.
    His wife and I looked uncomfortably at one another. She broke the contact first, darting her eyes away toward the floor and then out to where my car was parked. “You been staying out of trouble?”
    “Of course. Yes.”
    “But you’re writing filth, he says.”
    “He didn’t