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because they were out there in the sun, some of them bare-chested, calling out to one another.
Hot enough for you? Jesus, yes. Hot. Damn straight, it’s hot. Hotter than a firecracker. Hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch. Hotter than a naked dog in hell.
    “No, I didn’t get sick.” He slammed the truck’s door, and his voice was sharp. For a good while, he didn’t say anything, and when he finally spoke it was with a gentle tone. “I didn’t get sick, darlin’. I had to wait for dark to load up these blocks. You should see the stack we’ve got up there at that hospital site. I just took a few. Not enough for anyone to miss.”
    From time to time, Clare caught a glimpse of his temper, but it wasn’t anything that worried her. It was what she knew from men—their clenched jaw muscles, their bunched brows, their narrowed eyes. She knew the heat in their voices, their bluster. They were all little boys who’d never been loved enough, and now their big bodies couldn’t hold all the hurt they carried. Sometimes, when Ray was sleeping, she ran her finger lightly over his scars—the ridge low on his belly where the doctors had opened him to operate for rupture, the small white line at the corner of his lip where a knife had cut him, the mark on his ankle where doctors had set the fractured bone with a steel pin—and she loved him for all he wouldn’t tell her, all the stories behind those scars. She loved him for thinking he had to keep all that to himself.
    “Ray,” she said now. “You hadn’t ought to have taken these blocks. What if someone finds out?”
    “Ah, darlin’.” He put his arm across her back and gave her a squeeze. “Don’t you know I’m a lucky man?”
    She thought of his scarred body. “Not that lucky.”
    “Why, sure I am. I got you, didn’t I?”
    “You’re a nut. Sometimes I think you’re off your rocker.”
    “Oh, I’m crazy all right. Crazy in love.”
    “Well, if you’re crazy, I guess I am, too.”
    “That’s right. You and me. We’re head over heels. Tell me. Has any man ever treated you better?”
    “No,” she said. “Never.”
    Later, while she was sleeping, she woke to the sound of Ray moving through the house. At first she was confused. She thought she was still married to Bill. Then, when she had everything straight in her head, shame washed over her because she had denied her first husband when she had told Ray that no man had ever been as good to her as he had. But it was true, wasn’t it? She lay in bed, listening to him opening cabinets, and she knew it was impossible to say what was between people, and the longer you were with someone, the harder it was to even come close. All she knew was that once she had been with Bill and now she was with Ray. She had come out of her old life and into a new one, and even if she wished for it, which she didn’t—not really, she didn’t, not in her heart of hearts—she couldn’t go back.
    “Ray?” she called to him. “Hon, are you hungry?”
    She heard the refrigerator door open, heard the jangling of bottles. She called his name again, and when he didn’t answer, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, got up, and walked out into the kitchen.
    He was at the sink, pouring milk into a glass. He hadn’t turned on a light, and because it was the night of the new moon—June 11—the kitchen was so dark that Clare wouldn’t have been sure that it was Ray, that he was pouring milk, if not for the fact that he was whistling what had become his favorite song that summer, “Candy Man” (“Who can take a sunrise / Sprinkle it with dew?”), and she could smell the wax-coated milk carton.
    She asked him what he was doing, and he told her, in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, that he was going to have a glass of milky-wilky. She thought he was making a joke, and she laughed, but he didn’t laugh along with her or say anything else.
    “How can you see?” she asked. “You’ll pour too much and make a