I go back to the front room.
I curl into the corner of the sofa with the wine and the quilt and the book she put on the side table for me last week, the one about the woman in the lighthouse, and I read three pages and I do not take in a word of any of them, and I look at the door.
She saidback tonight.
It is six-twenty.
I read three more pages.
I look at the door.
It is six-forty.
I do not put the book down. I keep the book open on my lap because if I put the book down I will go to the window and I will stand at the window and I will watch the road, and I will be a woman watching the road for her woman, and I am not going to be that woman tonight. Tonight I am a woman who made a chicken. Tonight I am a woman with bread on the board and wine in her glass and a robe she likes on her body, and I am going to be reading when the headlights come up the road, and she is going to come in and see me reading, and she is going to put her boots by the door and her coat on the hook and she is going to walk over to the sofa and she is going to put her hand on the side of my face and she is going to say my name, and I am going to put the book down then, and not before.
I read three more pages.
I look at the door.
It is seven.
The headlights come up the road at seven-oh-six.
I hear the engine before I see the lights. The engine is not her truck. Her truck has a low rumble at idle and a small hesitation when she shifts into second, and I have learned the sound of her truck at the bottom of the road the way I once learned the sound of Daniel's car in the drive at the house in Sag Harbor when I was eleven years old waiting for him to be my father, and this is not her truck.
This is a heavier engine.
This is a pickup with a cleaner idle.
I sit up on the sofa.
I put the book down.
I pull the robe closer at the throat.
The engine cuts in the drive. A door opens. A door shuts. There is one set of boots on the gravel. The boots are slow. Theboots are not Max's boots. Max's boots are fast on gravel. Max's boots come up the porch steps in two strides and the screen door catches the inside of her shoulder because she does not slow for it. These boots are slow.
The boots come up the porch steps one at a time.
There is a knock.
Three short knocks. Hard. The knock of a person who has knocked on doors for a living.
I do not move.
The knock comes again.
"Mrs. Clark."
I stand up.
I stand up because the woman on the other side of the door has just used a name that is also not the name I am going by inside this cabin, and she has used it like a fact, and I feel the floor under my bare feet, and I feel the cold air at the gap under the door on my ankles.
"Mrs. Clark, I am Chief Valentina Mercer of the Redwater City Fire Department. I am here on official business. I would like you to open the door."
I look at the brass key on the counter.
I look at the chicken in the oven.
