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he said, “I missed you.”
    “I missed you too,”
said Jane. She looked out across the half mile of moving river at
Grand Island. When she and Jake’s girls were children there
were still lots of places over there where they could walk across a
swampy field and fight their way through impenetrable thickets to
streams full of perch and sunfish. The lights of the Holiday Inn
across the water were in the spot where there used to be pilings from
the old ferryboat landing and a vast empty field of dry weeds like
hay. Sometimes they would search the pebbly shore with sticks and
find big, heavy pieces of rust-encrusted iron that did not suggest
any known use but had probably come from old-time lumber boats.
    Carey drove east out of Buffalo
on Main Street into the open suburbs, until they came to a sprawling
restaurant built around a coach stop from the early 1800s, along the
road that was laid over the Seneca trail. There were big stone
fireplaces where resin-soaked pine logs flared and crackled, fed a
steady stream of fresh oxygen by the air-conditioning. The walls were
lined with buggy whips and harnesses and Currier & Ives prints,
and when the food came, the roast beef was served with Yorkshire
pudding.
    They sat at a table beside the
front window. Jane smiled as she surveyed the dining room. “I
forgot this place existed.”
    “Me too,” he said.
“I picked it because it’s a good place to talk.”
    “You picked it because it
reminds you of your house.” Jane had seen an old Holland Land
Company map that Ellicott, the company agent, had used for the sale
of Seneca land in 1801. Clearly marked in its place was “McKinnon
house.”
    “What do you want to talk
about – horses?”
    Carey was quiet and serious.
“Last time, you told me about your trip. Are you going to tell
me this time?”
    “I think I did what I
wanted to do.” Her eyes scanned the empty tables around her to
be sure none of the waiters had drifted too near. “But it
wasn’t smooth.”
    “You mean somebody’s
looking for you?”
    “Maybe, but not hard, and
not for long. It had nothing to do with me.” She scanned the
restaurant again, and when her eyes returned to him, she smiled.
“Sounds brave, doesn’t it?”
    “I’m awed, as
usual,” he said.
    “Don’t be.
Twenty-four hours ago I was as scared as anybody alive. I could
almost taste the strawberries.”
    He cocked his head. “What
strawberries?”
    She looked down and shook her
head. “It’s just an old expression.” She paused.
“Really old. It means you came so close that you could already
taste the wild strawberries that grow by the path to the other
world.”
    He looked down too, and then up
again to fix his eyes on hers. “Want to tell me what brought
that on?”
    “I made a mistake –
took a chance to buy some extra time for my rabbit. I ended up in a
high place, looking down, the way you do in a bad dream.” She
patted his hand. “Since I didn’t fall, I guess you could
say nothing actually happened. What did you do while I was gone?”
    “Surgery every morning at
seven except Friday. Office visits from one to five. Hospital rounds
five to seven.”
    “And then?”
    “I thought about how to
talk to you. You’re not that easy. You have a long history of
standing up and walking around whenever anybody says anything, so I
decided to take you to a restaurant.”
    “Big talk, huh? Serious
stuff?”
    “Yes. You told me what
happened on your trip in December. You said that I should think about
what I’d heard. If I asked you again after I’d thought
about it, you would say yes.”
    Jane said, “No, I told you
I loved you. I told you that if you asked me again after one year, I
would say yes. And if you do, I will.”
    Carey’s long, strong
fingers moved up his forehead and pushed back the shock of hair that
had begun to creep down. “I’m a very quick thinker. I’ve
been thinking about it for six months. No. Let me start again,”
he said. “You and I have