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agreeable mouth you have on, Miss Nash.”
    “Why, thank you, sir.”
    “Any reason I shouldn’t kiss it?”
    “None that I can think of.”
    So I did. She kissed me back, gently. And then not so gently. I reached inside her nightshirt for whatever I might find in there.
    “Careful,” she whispered. “They’re sensitive.”
    “Nice and warm, too.” I know I was certainly overheating. It had been quite a while since we’d been joined together in atomic passion. Longer than I cared to admit. “I could get back in there with you, you know.”
    Her eyes widened in mock horror. “Merciful heavens, Hoagy. Tracy could be permanently scarred.”
    “Or permanently impressed.”
    “I should have had her when I was twenty-two,” she said ruefully. She said this a lot. Practically every day. “I would have had energy for the both of you then. I just don’t now.” She tugged primly at her nightshirt, buttoning it. “And I certainly don’t feel sexy. More like some form of large, slow farm animal.”
    “You don’t look like one, Merilee.”
    Her eyes softened. “Really?”
    “Really,” I said, reaching for her.
    Only now we could hear Dwayne’s truck turning in at the foot of the drive, stereo thumping, engine rack-racketing—the kid had little or nothing in the way of a muffler. He pulled up outside the carriage barn in a splattering of gravel and hopped out. I heard voices. Thor was up. The two of them were getting acquainted.
    Merilee pushed me away, reluctantly but firmly. “I’ll be down to say hello as soon as I do my post-natal exercises.”
    “I can suggest some terribly interesting new exercises.”
    “Those, mister, are very old ones. Now off with you. Go on. Scoot.”
    It was my turn to sigh grandly and tragically. I climbed to my feet and started for the door.
    “The thing of it is,” she pointed out, “I wasn’t ready to be a mother when I was that age. I wasn’t a grown-up, not like I am …” She stopped short, her brow creasing with concern. “Are you all right, darling? You look terribly pale all of a sudden.”
    “I’m fine. Still can’t get used to the idea that I’m living with a grown-up, that’s all.”
    “Hoagy?”
    “Yes, Merilee?”
    “Hello.”
    “Hello, yourself.”
    Dwayne was busy showing Thor the sill work he was doing. Thor was busy making all sorts of enthusiastic noises. The man always did have a gift for drawing people out. Making them see themselves and their work, whatever it was, as something to be proud of.
    Proud made for a nice break in the day for Dwayne Gobble. He was a tall, grungy beanpole of a kid with veiny red hands and a scraggly goatee and dirty blond hair he wore in that style favored by heavy metal musicians and minor league hockey players—short on top, long and stringy in back. A strikingly ugly purple scar slanted across his forehead and halfway down his nose—this from when he’d gone headfirst through his windshield a while back. They hadn’t done a very good job of sewing him back together. One eyebrow was higher than the other, one eye slightly atilt. It was as if two different people’s faces had been stitched together. Dwayne had worn the same flannel shirt and torn jeans every day since he started working for us, his jeans stained and filthy and so loose they practically fell from his bony hips. He favored tattoos. Had any number of them on his arms. None said loser. He didn’t need that one. Already had it written all over him. Chiefly it was his eyes, which never looked directly at you. Down at your feet or over your shoulder or up in the air—anywhere but at you. Dwayne was a troubled kid. The village outcast, actually. But nice enough, once you got to know him. And it really wasn’t his fault no one in town besides us would hire him.
    Thor knelt in the damp earth beside the twin hydraulic jacks that presently held up that corner of the barn, scrutinizing one of the pressure-treated two-by-fours Dwayne had sistered in.