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paused. “And my guess is Sam doesn’t want to think about it, either.”
    Ruth nodded then. There was a brief, tired silence between us. I saw how some of her hair, sand-colored like Sam’s, had fallen out of the bun she’d put it in, and lay now across her cheek like a silk ribbon.
    “I’m sorry, Ruth. What can I say? I tried. It was a good day when it started. I just got a step or two behind, that’s all.”
    “Old Dwight,” Ruth said almost sadly, shaking her head.
    I sensed some long-ago tenderness in her voice; if not for the darkness, I would have sworn she was looking me straight in the eyes. For a second I forgot what kind of day it had been.
    Then she broke the spell. My ex-wife. She brought our son extra-close, held him by the shoulders with his back against her front, as if to keep him from running anywhere dangerous he might want to go. “Well, Dwight,” she said. “You’re a free man, I guess.”
    “Free to go, you mean.”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    “Till next Sunday.”
    “That’s the rules.”
    I looked at Sam. “What’ll we do on Sunday, sport?”
    He shrugged; it had been a long day. “I dunno.”
    “We’ll sleep on it. Okay?”
    “Okay, Dad.”
    “I love you,” I said.
    I got in the car without waiting to see if he’d say it back. My strength was down and I could feel the panic rising not so far off, about to flood over the dam. I keyed the engine and switched on the headlight.
    “You should get that light fixed, Dwight,” Norris said through the open window. “It’s against the law.”
    “Thanks for the tip, Norris. I intend to.”
    Ruth already had Sam on the porch steps. Norris hurried after them.
    I tried to bring myself to drive away then, but couldn’t. I watched my son enter the bright sphere of porch light, his battered eye come to shocking life.
    Norris caught up with them. Ruth opened the screen door. The three of them were just about to go inside when Sam turned suddenly and gave me a small stiff wave so fraught with the tragic circumstances of life that tears sprang to my eyes.
    I stuck my head out the window. “Don’t forget to ice that eye!”
    But the door was already closed; the porch light went out. It was just my one headlight now, climbing the house, rearranging space. Bad magic. I put the car in gear and turned around, leaving tire tracks on the lawn.

Grace
    She sat curled up on the worn green-velvet chair in her studio, holding her knees in her arms as if they constituted a whole person, a love.
    The room was full of shadows. The carefully nurtured plants standing in clay pots and hanging by long weblike wires from the ceiling—the plants she had watered and looked to for inspiration and sometimes even talked to like people—were gathered around her now as always. But in the lack of light the leaves and flowers that had always seemed to her like the natural forms of words, a kind of living poetry, were suddenly just dead shadows like everything else, everyone else, the dark absent space where something of value had once been. As if, she thought, someone had just told her how the magic trick worked and ruined everything.
    It was a sham. It was loss, just loss.
    Something came nudging now against her shin, warm and insistent: Sallie. Shepherd-collie mix, eight years old. Same age as Emma. She reached out and stroked the noble head, fingers working behind the fine, upstanding ears. The two-tone-brown dog eyes fixed on her, one ring of color softer than the other; a universe there, impossibly soft and liquid. And fur the color of tortoiseshell, like something pulled from a sultan’s treasure chest.
    “Sallie,” she whispered.
    Then, closing the door in herself that had come ajar, she pushed the dog away. Sallie took a few steps back and hesitated, eyes searching. But Grace was inward, unseeing. Soon just the paws padding on the rug and clicking on the wood floor, and then she was alone.
    Thinking:
Where is Ethan?
He should have been home by