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earthy odor on his breath, a smell that spoke of parts of the body normally kept hidden.
    “Can you keep a secret?” he said.

chapter
FOUR
    I got home around a quarter after nine in the evening. Apart from picking up milk and coffee, the trip had been make-work: Amy kept the cupboards well stocked. I’d walked into town from the house, which took twenty minutes. It was a pleasant stroll, and I’d have done it that way even if the car hadn’t been unavailable. I sat outside the coffee place and nursed an Americano while leafing through the local paper, learning several things: The trajectories of two cars had intersected a few nights before—nobody was hurt, not even a little bit; some local big shot got reelected to the school board for the twelfth straight year, which seemed borderline obsessional; and the Cascades Gallery needed a mature person to help sell paintings and sculptures of eagles and bears and Indian braves. Experience unnecessary, but candidates were instructed to bring a willingness to follow a dream. That didn’t sound like me, even if the writing project remained stalled. I hoped the gallery did find someone, however, and that the lucky winner was sufficiently mature. I hated to think of limited-edition art prints being sold in a juvenile manner.
    I prowled the aisles of Sam’s Market for longer than necessary, picking items up and putting them back. Found a couple things too outré to have shown up on more enlightened shopping agendas, chiefly beers, and at the checkout I added a paperback Stephen King. I’d read it before, but most of my books were still in storage down in L.A., plus it was right there in front of me, in a rickety rack full of secondhand Dan Brown and triple-named romantic women done up in lurid gilt.
    Back in the lot, I loaded the bag into my backpack and stood irresolute. A pickup truck sat ticking in the silence. I’d seen the owner inside, a local with craggy features and moss in his ears, and he’d ignored me in the way newcomers deserved. I’d made a point of saying hi, just to mess with his head. A couple emerged from Laverne’s Rib across the street, rolling as if on the deck of a ship. Laverne’s prided itself on the magnitude of its portions. The couple looked like they’d known this ahead of time. A tired-looking woman pushed a stroller past the market with the air of someone not engaged in the activity for the sheer fun of it, and her baby fought the night with everything it had, principally sound. The woman saw me looking and muttered, “Ten months,” as if that explained everything. I looked away from her awkwardly.
    Down the road a stoplight blinked.
    I still wasn’t hungry. Didn’t want to go drink a beer somewhere public. I could walk up the street, see if the little bookstore was still open. It wasn’t likely, and I now had a novel to read, which was what ultimately took the wind out of the night’s sails. The expedition was over, run aground on an impulse purchase.
    So now what? Pick your own adventure.
    In the end I walked back the way I’d come, past the hundred yards of stores that constituted Birch Crossing. Most were single-story and wood-fronted, a dentist, hair salon, and drugstore interspersing places of more transitory appeal, including the Cascades Gallery itself, from which Amy had already acquired two aimlessly competent paintings of the generic West. The blocks were rooted by stolid brick structures built when the town’s frock-coated boosters believed it would amount to more than it had. One of these held Laverne’s, another was a bank no longer locally owned, and the last offered the opportunity to buy decoratively battered bits of furniture. Amy had availed herself of these wares, too, an example of which currently served as my desk. The street trailed off into a small gas station that had been tricked out long ago to look like a mountain chalet, and finally the local sheriff’s office, set back from the road. I had to fight an