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would get back to normal.
    She imagined that he was eager to lay claim to a home, even that square frame house with its ugly brown asphalt shingle siding.
    So the idea was to build a porch and then, little by little, win the neighbors over. They’d have the life he’d always dreamed of: a wife and a home and friends to fill it. “I’ve never had that,” he told Clare. He said it with a quiet simplicity—merely stating the fact—and it broke her heart to know that it was so.
    One evening in June, he came home when it was well past dark. Clare was outside taking clothes off the line. Earlier, she had walked home from Brookstone Manor, the nursing home where she worked—sometimes in the laundry, sometimes in housecleaning, and sometimes in the kitchen. She had scrubbed out her white uniform dress, her cook’s apron, and three of the sleeveless T-shirts that Ray wore and had hung them to dry. Now she was taking down the clothes, folding them, and laying them in her laundry basket. Around her, faint voices drifted out through her neighbors’ open windows, and from time to time a murmur of laughter rose up from a television program. A screen door’s spring creaked. An oscillating fan whirred. She had left the clothes out as long as she could so she wouldn’t have to stand in the light and have her neighbors pass by, talking in low voices—harping, so she would believe, about her and Ray and what a fool she was to take up with the likes of him. Soon the dew would start falling; already the air smelled of it, cool and damp, and she was hurrying to gather the clothes.
    Ray drove his pickup into the yard. The tailpipe scraped over the gravel driveway. That’s how low the rear end was riding. The headlight beams came to rest on her, and she shielded her eyes with her hand.
    He cut off the engine. The truck backfired once and then was still. He opened the door, the hinges squealing, and the dome light’s glow fell over him. He bent forward and touched his forehead to the steering wheel. Then he pulled his shoulders back, lifted his head, and ran a hand over his face, starting with his brow and then wiping straight down, over his eyes, nose, mouth, and chin.
    Clare came across the yard and rested her clothes basket on the truck’s fender. It was a 1958 Ford that he’d bought for a song from an excavating company, and instead of leaving TRI-STATE BACKHOE on the green doors, he’d painted a large black circle over each one. “Now that’s sporty,” he told Clare. Then, in the middle of each black circle, with white paint, he stenciled the truck’s empty weight and the name of the city and state.

    EW: 3900
    Tower Hill, Ind.

    Just below the windows, he painted his name in a small, elegant script: R. R. WRIGHT. “Raymond Royal Wright,” he said when he finished. “Now folks know who they’re dealing with.”
    Generally, he kept some tools and his fishing gear in the bed of the truck, but tonight the tools and the tackle were in the cab because the truck was loaded down with cement blocks—a gray-faced wall of them, squared and neat against the sideboards. Clare balanced the clothes basket against her hip, reached out her free hand, and laid it flat against the cement, which was rough and cool.
    “You had me worried, Ray.” She pulled her hand back from the blocks. “It got dark, and I kept thinking something had happened to you. Did you pass out again? Did you get sick from the sun?”
    He had always been sensitive to the sun. From time to time on the job, the heat got to him and he keeled over. The men humped him down from the scaffold and laid him in the shade. They threw water in his face, took off their shirts and fanned him. Sometimes he pissed himself, and, of course, after he had his senses back they gave him a hard time, and he couldn’t help but hate them. He sat in the shade with a cold drink, and sometimes he had to turn his head and gag up what was in his stomach, and he hated the men even more