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the bats are back,” Thomas said a few days ago, and then you took your wool coat off its hook by the door and stored it on a shelf in a glass case, afraid the moths would find it. Even the glass case took your energy. You had to lift up on the handle while shutting it or it wouldn’t close all the way, and while you were closing it, Thomas was talking to you, or rather he was reading to you from his magazine. He wanted you to know how smart it was that he tutored the girls all year round because according to his magazine, schools were dumbing down textbooks, and dumbing down tests, and dumbing down courses in public schools. These were things you somehow already knew about. It wasn’t an article that was shedding any new light on what you already had learned as a parent of two children in the school system. “Stop already,” you said to him, “I know all this,” but Thomas did not listen and he kept reading, loudly, his deep voice seeming to resonate through your own chest because he was standing so close to you, wanting you to listen, and he was so loud that you could feel his voice inside yourself, behind your rib cage, like the rumble of a nasty chest cough.
    And you wonder if, like Dinah’s husband, he too is losing his hearing from his hunting rifle going off by his ear so many times. But really he didn’t shoot that often. You know this because years ago, before you had children, the two of you would hunt together on your property. He would sit high on a ridge overlooking the slender stream in your valley, and you, lower down, would face the opposite way, toward acres and acres of woods thick with nettles and scrub pines and tangles of blackberry bushes. You would sit very still and the few times you saw a buck, you would not shoot. You did not want it to die. You did not want to have to drag it home after chasing it in the woods, after following drops of blood and the sound of it stumbling. You did not want to have to eat its lean meat. You would let the deer pass by, and a few hours later after you learned to feel the quiet, and you became part of the quiet yourself, then your husband would rise from where he sat and come down toward you, and the sounds of his hard-heeled boots crunching on the leaves and his stiff canvass coat bending back and breaking branches were so loud compared to the quiet you were just a part of that it seemed as if there were an entire herd of your husband crashing through the woods. “Did you see anything?” he would ask, trying to whisper, but even his whisper was loud. Cradling your rifles as you walked back to your house, and then emptying out the bullets on the front lawn before you entered, you would shake your head. “No, not unless you count a few squirrels and a few noisy birds,” you would say. Slowly, over the years, you stopped going hunting with him, and so he would tell your girls, “Just wait until you are old enough. I will take you hunting. You can take your mother’s rifle.” But he himself was less fond of killing the deer than he was of just sitting quietly on the ridge, and so he would come home with just the smell of the leaves on him, bringing in the cold air when he opened the door.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T his is a qualifier meet weeks later when the weather is warmer. Driving two hours south to the away meet, you pass trees on the sides of the highway that look faintly green, the buds on the ends of their branches brand-new. You think how in a week’s time there will be leaves on the trees up by where you live too. No longer will people driving in cars on your road be able to turn their heads and look up at your house as it sits high on a hill, the copper roof like the buds on these trees, just starting to turn faint green with age. Once again, the trees will grow leaves and the bushes and the blond, tall grass will grow, and no one will be able to see you and your family walking through the rooms of your