When the cancer came back, I wasn’t surprised. I was upset for Caroline, knowing she’d have to be told eventually, and I was bothered about how Sall would take it, after last time. I was even sorry for Malky, because finding reliable drivers was difficult, and he’d always been a good boss. Still, I wasn’t surprised, not when they told me. I’d been expecting something to go wrong since the summer, when Sall and I had talked about flying over to Montreal to see Caroline and meet her new boyfriend, then given up on the idea. Sall knew I was keen, of course: Caroline had always been Daddy’s little girl, and, ever since she’d left, it had been an effort to hide how empty the house felt without her—an effort I’d sometimes failed to make. Sall probably knew as well as I did that I was on borrowed time, so to begin with she had gone through all the motions of planning the trip, but then she’d started talking about how expensive it was and how tiring it would be for me, having to drive over to Glasgow, then sit on the plane for seven hours, and then, after all that, there was immigration and customs, which took forever. The way she spoke, it was as if she’d made the journey herself, but she hadn’t. She’d never even left Scotland, and all that talk about the Montreal customs was just stuff she’d picked up from Caroline, who’d been back three times in the six years since she got the job in Montreal. Not long before her last visit, though, she had met this new boyfriend and had started making a big thing about how it was our turn to go over there.

“I understand it’s a long way,” she’d said. “But you’ll love it when you get there. You’ll see. It’ll be a nice holiday. Besides, Jim keeps asking me if you really exist. He thinks I made you up.” She’d laughed, but the invitation was real, even if she didn’t look at Sall when she said it but kept her eyes fixed on me. She was content to work around her mother for my sake, now that the two of them didn’t have to live in the same house. For her, it was all about careful management, about avoiding those occasions when something might be said that couldn’t be taken back. Even before she left, she had come and gone like a ghost, just so she didn’t have to be with Sall. I’d never really understood why. I once overheard Caroline say that her mother could start a fight in an empty room, but that wasn’t altogether fair. The two of them just weren’t able to sit together without arriving at some kind of disagreement or misunderstanding. It was a mismatch of personalities, something that happened all the time, in all kinds of situations. It was shocking only when it happened between a mother and her child.

Whenever Caroline extended one of those vague invitations, I wanted to tell her that we’d come over as soon as we could, but Sall always got in first. “We’ll see” was all she’d say, and then she would go to work, undermining the idea. That was what she had done during the summer, making up excuses and problems and eventually talking the trip out of existence, till we ended up driving down to Hertfordshire instead, for a sad fortnight of rain and tea shops with Sall’s brother Tom and his second wife. I’d understood what was going on, and I told myself that it was probably for the best, what with the history between them; still, that so-called holiday was more of an upset than I’d expected. At first, I just put it down to the usual disappointment with Sall’s games and the way I never seemed to be able to stand up to her, but somewhere in the midst of it all, wandering around a grimy little bric-a-brac shop in Stevenage, I realized that I’d given up the last chance I would ever have to visit Montreal.

So the knowledge was there, sitting at the back of my mind, waiting to come true, when the doctor told me. I was almost ready for it: almost accepting, the way you’re supposed to be in all the stories they tell about dying. Not completely but close, just waiting to hear how it was going to be, so I could walk out of the surgery and get on with what was left of my life. I had a matter of months, the specialist thought, and the idea crossed my mind that I could do anything I liked. I was free. Except that there wasn’t anything I wanted to do that much, apart from seeing Caroline, and I knew what Sall would say to that now. I’d heard it all before: how I had never had any time for anybody but my little girl, how I’d spoiled her rotten. To hear Sall talk, you’d have thought that what happened between them was all my fault, but I looked back in my mind’s eye and I tried to find a picture, one reliable image of the two of them happy together, and I couldn’t. Not even when Caroline was a baby. I could see me standing at the window in the back bedroom, rocking her to sleep and singing her Christmas carols, because they were the only songs I could remember, and I could see the two of us, when Caroline was six, going around and around on the horses at Flamingo Park, while Sall sat off by herself, watching, a curious, slightly bewildered look on her face, as if she were ashamed or embarrassed about something. I could see Caroline laughing at my bad jokes as we drove to school in the mornings, and I saw us making a row of snowmen in the garden—four of them, all identical. That was why I liked driving, and that was why I didn’t mind going back on the road so soon, because when I was out there, on my own, I would look at those pictures in my head and I would be happy.

Anyway, the day after I got the diagnosis, I was back at work, hauling treacle. When Malky called, that first evening, Sall told him I was fine, and that I’d be back in the morning. I didn’t blame her for that; we needed the money. I suppose I should have been disappointed that she didn’t want me at home, at least for a little while, but I wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t really her fault. She just didn’t know how to deal with that kind of thing. Even before we left the surgery, I could feel her edging away, the way she always did whenever there was a problem. She slipped away into her own separate place, as she had done when we were first married and things weren’t what either of us had expected, or during the long weeks after Caroline moved away and we were left stranded, speechless and unable to touch or even look at each other, alone together with the quiet of an empty house and a shelf’s worth of pale photographs in the matching set of Shaker-style frames that Sall had bought at the Sue Ryder.

So I’m not blaming her. I was just as glad to go back on the road and not have to sit moping about the house. Besides, I’ve always liked pulling treacle—molasses, to give it its proper name. Every now and then, I run around the countryside, delivering the warm, dark slop that farmers use to supplement the fodder for their cattle, blending the treacle with barley to make a sweet malty mix that the beasts can’t get enough of. I like going out on the farms, all quiet and lonely in the middle of the day; I like talking to the farmers and listening to their stories—men who have never been anywhere in all their born years save these hundred acres of ground, grown men haunted by their own holdings. To be honest, I like hauling treacle more than anything else. There are times when it’s so thick and dark and solid you could walk on it, and we have to work hard to get it pumped out and into the big tanks, which are usually so old and creaky that you think they won’t hold. Sometimes they don’t. On a really warm day, one of the pipes, or maybe the wall of the tank, will give way, and there will be treacle everywhere: treacle and the smell of treacle that makes you dizzy, it’s so sweet and strong.

It was hard work, but it was good being busy. It gave me less time to dwell. And I knew, when I started out that winter’s morning, that I’d feel better coming home with a full day’s work under my belt, knowing that I wasn’t quite used up. I thought about that all day, driving round the farms in the frosty light—about how I would keep going till I couldn’t go on anymore. All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know. That was how it had always been, even at home: my real life was separate from the day-to-day business that Sall knew or cared enough about to make decisions. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, at least to begin with; we got on well enough in the first few years. It was just that we’d always been private people, in our different ways. That was probably what made it possible for us to stay together after Caroline left. We knew how to keep ourselves to ourselves, a skill we had perfected through the years without even knowing how completely we had mastered it.

It was late in the afternoon, the sun just going down over the fields, the last of the light filtering through the trees and shrubs along the road by the old hospital. The first green of evening, my mother had always called it, sitting on the back step at home, watching the Peruvian lilies and the montbretia fade into the gloaming. I was never sure if that was a phrase of her own, or a quote from something, some radio drama, say, or a children’s book she’d read to me in the days before memory. Usually, if I got home early, this was my time. While Sall made herself busy in the kitchen, I would sit in the dining room with the paper spread out on the table, or I would listen to the radio, staring out at the garden and fiddling with the dials to get a better signal. That day, though, I had pulled a long run, only just finishing up at Jacob’s Well Farm when the dark set in. It had been a good day, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to overdo it, so I was happy enough saying my goodbyes to Ben Walsh, who used to run Jacob’s Well with his dad, and keeps it going himself now, his wife gone, no kids, both his parents dead. He had been living alone like that for some years by then, which was maybe why he paid so much attention to the few people he encountered. That day, it was attention I could have done without, but then he wasn’t to know what my troubles were. He offered me a cup of tea, but he didn’t seem to mind when I told him I’d better get on back. He gave me a solemn little smile and shook his head. “How’s the missus?” he said. “Keeping all right?” He always talked about Sall as if she were an invalid.

“Can’t complain,” I said.

“That’s good.” He gave me an odd, shy look. “Still, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re looking a bit under the weather yourself.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Yes?”

“I’m a bit tired, I suppose,” I said. “It’ll pass.”

He nodded. He was curious and, I think, genuinely concerned, but he knew not to pursue it. “Well, I hope so,” he said. “You take care of yourself. You don’t want to be coming down with something, right before Christmas.”

I managed a smile. “You can say that again,” I said. “Anyway, this is the last of it, before the holidays. I’ll get a good rest then. You take care, too.” I shook his hand and got back into the rig. For a moment, I wished I’d said yes to the tea and stopped, not to talk about anything in particular but to keep company with the man for a while. I couldn’t imagine that his Christmas would be that festive, with just him and the animals.

Then again, I couldn’t imagine much of a Christmas for myself, now that everything was decided. I wasn’t looking forward to the quiet of the holidays, or having to go through the motions with Sall, which she would want to do, because—well, it was Christmas. Maybe Caroline would ring, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, making the call first thing, so she could get on with the rest of the day knowing she’d done her duty. I hadn’t said anything to her about the cancer, of course. I’d considered telling her the first time, but it would only have worried her, and then she might have felt duty-bound to come over. This time, I didn’t even give it a second thought, because I knew for sure that I was going to die, and I wanted to do it in my own way. I wanted to let go of life with some kind of grace, or at least with some attention to what was happening, instead of just sitting quietly in the middle of some great drama between Sall and Caroline about what they thought I should do. That was how it had been through so much of my life: I hadn’t missed any of the big events, but, at the same time, I hadn’t felt entirely present while they were happening. Those last few weeks, though, I noticed everything. Like the way time would catch up with me all of a sudden, and I’d see myself opening a letter, or making a cup of tea: see myself from above, doing these ordinary little things and taking an odd pleasure in them, though I can’t say why.

I’d notice things out on the road, too, things I’d seen a thousand times before and had liked without knowing why. Little details and imaginings I’d dismissed all my life as plain silliness suddenly became important. Like that stretch of road on the way back from the Glasgow run, when I would pass the turnoff for Larbert. I used to see it all the time: a blue road sign and a row of cherry-cola street lamps running off into the distance—Larbert, A9. It was odd how much I liked that sign. I’d never had reason to go to Larbert. We didn’t do any runs in that direction, but maybe that was why I’d always liked the name. Larbert. It sounded like a place where the teen-age years went on forever, all gray days by the water and strange-tasting sweets that fizzed in your mouth, making you think of the possibility of sex. Not that I had ever known much about sex as a teen-ager, other than what I saw in films and the oddly pleasurable discomfort I felt when Rita Compton visited my sister.

That was the kind of stuff that was running through my head when I came across the boy, a few hundred yards into the woods, in the first of the heavy rain. I was thirty miles from home when it started, a thick sleet that might turn to snow later, or might come to nothing; it was already dark enough for headlights, but as I came into the woods, passing under the beech trees, it was like entering a little theatre, the lights flickering across the darkness, the woods black and still, like a backdrop. I’d always liked that about the woods, the way they suddenly closed in on me as if a story were about to be told. Like when I was a boy, and the announcer on “Listen with Mother” would say, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.” Usually the road was empty, with maybe the odd set of headlamps—not a person, not even a car, just an effect of the light—streaming past in the opposite direction. But that night the story contained another character, though he wasn’t a character from any of the children’s books I knew.

To begin with, I thought he was a woman. Maybe I wouldn’t have stopped if I’d known otherwise. He certainly looked like a woman: a black dress, no coat, fish-net stockings, ankle boots, shoulder-length wavy hair. She was walking slowly, toward the far end of that little avenue of beech trees, and I couldn’t make out much, but when my lights picked her out she turned, and I saw that there was something odd about her, something heavy. Not that I guessed right away that she was a boy. It was dark and rainy, and then, when I saw her properly, I was distracted by the bruises on her face: the bruises, the mess her hair was in, the dark stain that might have been blood on her right leg, just below the hem of the dress.

I didn’t pick up hitchhikers much. I did in the early days, and I’d enjoyed the chat most of the time. Not always, but enough to make it worthwhile. More recently, though, I’d preferred being alone in the cab. Some nights, coming home in the dark, reeling off the narrow roads that ran to Perth or St. Andrews, remembering the way by my own landmarks—the hedges and drystone dykes and the spaces between them that other people didn’t even notice, tight angles of holly or lamplight as I came through a town—I would realize, with a pleasant rush of surprise, that I was fond of myself as I was, fond of my life, and yet, at the same time, not that worried about having to let it go. I had got past the stage when company seemed like a good thing on the road, and I have to admit that I thought about driving on that night, even after I’d noticed the gash on her leg. I didn’t need complications, and by then everything that wasn’t part of the usual schedule had come to seem unnecessarily complicated. Nevertheless, I made myself stop, and I pulled up alongside her—still thinking of this person on the road as a woman, possibly a woman in real difficulty—just to check, at least, that she was all right. I rolled down the window and leaned across to the passenger side. “You look like you ran into some trouble,” I called out, trying to make myself heard above the engine and, at the same time, not to be so loud that I might frighten her.

The moment I put on the brake, she stopped walking—and that was when I realized that she wasn’t a woman. She looked up, and I could see it in everything about her: the way she stood, the darkness in her face, the heaviness. It was a boy, not a woman. Not a man, either, just a boy of eighteen or twenty, fairly thickset and not at all feminine. When he looked up at me, I saw the fear in his face, behind the mass of wet makeup and mascara, a fear that he wanted, but couldn’t quite manage, to hide. “I’m O.K.,” he said, but he stayed where he was, stock still, waiting.

“Where are you headed?” I said, switching off the ignition and trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.

“Home,” he said. Then he mumbled something else that I couldn’t make out.

“What was that?” I said.

He shook his head. He seemed desperate, though I wasn’t sure if he was desperate to be helped or to be left alone—at least, not until he spoke. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

I knew then that he wanted to trust me enough to get him home safe and dry. I also knew that he didn’t trust anybody, not right at that moment, anyway. “Well,” I said, “I’m Bill Harley. I’m on my way home from a long run delivering molasses, and it’s nearly Christmas, so I’m not going to leave you out here in the dark.”

Something changed in him then. Maybe it struck him as funny that I was talking about molasses, but he seemed to soften. He moved closer to the cab and tried to see inside. “I’m going home,” he said. “It’s just down this road.” He looked up into my face. “I’ll be fine,” he added, though he sounded less convinced than before.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Do yourself a favor. We’ll get you home, and you can get cleaned up.” I swung the passenger-side door open.

The boy nodded. I suppose he’d sized me up and decided it was worth the risk. Or maybe he was just past caring and the promise of shelter was more than he could resist. “All right,” he said. “It’s very kind of you.”

I nodded, then waited while he climbed in. He had a bit of trouble with that, what with the dress and the sling-back shoes, which I assumed he wasn’t used to, but finally he got himself settled and pulled the door shut. I looked at him for a moment in the golden light from the overhead, then I started the engine as casually as I could. “Well,” I said, raising my voice so he could hear me above the noise. “Where are you headed?”

“Coaltown?”

I nodded and turned back toward the road. It was a good twenty miles to Coaltown, not just down the road, but I had to pass it on my way home anyway. “O.K.,” I said.

“You know it?”

“I used to work there,” I said. “Long time ago.”

“Well, he said. “You’ll not find it much changed. I guarantee you that.”

“I don’t suppose I will,” I said, releasing the hand brake. As I did, I caught sight of the gash on his leg. It looked nasty, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. There was dirt all over his legs and hands, dirt and blood dried into the mesh of his fish-net stockings. His face was badly bruised, as if someone had punched him several times. I turned back toward the road, but I knew that he’d noticed me looking at him.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Just a few cuts and grazes.”

I shook my head. “It’s a bit more than that,” I said.

He let out a short, hard laugh, as if I’d made some joke at his expense. “I suppose it is,” he said—and I detected something in his voice, more of a drift than a slur, that suggested he might be on something.

“Well,” I said. “It’s none of my business. But I’ve got a first-aid kit in the box behind you.” I tilted my head toward the back. “If you want to get yourself sorted out.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “But thanks, anyway.” He shot me a quick glance, then looked away. “I’ve had worse.”

“Really?”

“Rules of the game,” he said. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I just went to the wrong party.” He glanced out at the side mirror. “I suppose it was a mistake, going for the Aileen Wuornos look.” I had to think about that for a moment, before I remembered who he was talking about, and he must have seen the realization dawn in my face, because he laughed again, louder and more confident this time. “Don’t worry, Bill,” he said. “I didn’t bring the gun.”

I had to smile at that. “Well,” I said. “There’s a relief.”

He laughed again, but this time his laughter was good-humored and warm, and I was suddenly glad that I’d stopped. “So,” he said. “Where are you headed, Bill Harley?”

“Home,” I said, and I realized that I didn’t want to think about home, at least for the moment. I wanted to be out on the road still, out on the road on a winter’s night, with no set destination, passing the time with someone I’d never see again.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Home.” He dwelled on the word for the moment before moving on. “Soon be Christmas,” he said.

“Not long.” I looked over at him; he was watching me, attentive, taking me in, maybe searching for something that he thought I wanted to keep hidden—and I had an image of Caroline, of how she had watched me like that sometimes when she was younger, hoping for a clue to what lay behind the façade that she thought I was working so hard to maintain. Maybe that was what made me say what I said next, surprising myself, and the boy. I didn’t say it very loudly, and I wasn’t really speaking to him, but it was loud enough to be audible above the noise of the engine. “One last Christmas,” I said. “Better make the most of it, eh?”

It wasn’t what I’d intended to say, though I wasn’t sorry I’d said it. Still, I had no wish to pursue the notion any further, now that it was out—and I think he understood that, because, after allowing just enough space for what I might say next, he let it go without another word, and we drove on in silence, staring out from our separate places into the sleety darkness, our faces filling with light from time to time as a car passed from the opposite direction. It was slow going, then, but the silence didn’t bother me; if anything, it felt strangely comfortable, like having a passenger in the cab and being alone at the same time. After a while, though, the boy picked up the conversation, slipping casually into the kind of slow-moving, pointless talk that goes on between people of good will who don’t know each other well: stuff about football—I was surprised by that, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been—and some documentary he’d seen on television. It could have been anybody in the cab with me, to begin with at least, but then he started talking about other things, minor stuff about his school days mostly, only it was funny and good-humored, and all the time I knew he was really talking about something else altogether, some other story about himself that he wanted to tell, not out of need but because it was interesting. Like his memory of the school atlas that he’d been given in geography class—how he had loved the way the world was all mapped out, all the colors and lines and borders perfect and just, so that it looked like the kind of world it would be a pleasure to inhabit, an utterly fictional world where you could never be lost, because everybody and everything belonged somewhere. I enjoyed that, for as long as it lasted, partly because it felt new, to be driving along like this, talking to a boy in a dress and runny makeup, but also because he was such good company. When we finally reached the turn for Coaltown, he leaned forward in his seat slightly. “If you drop me here, that’ll be fine,” he said.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to leave him in the dark, on another stretch of featureless road. “I’ll take you to your door,” I said. “It’s no trouble.”

“Thanks, Bill,” he said. “But I’d rather walk from here. No offense.” He looked over at me, and, even out of the corner of my eye, I could see that he was hoping he hadn’t somehow insulted me.

“None taken,” I said, but I turned off the main road and carried on a few hundred yards toward the coast before I stopped.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

He put his hand on the door, as if to go, then he turned and smiled, not so much at me as at something that had just crossed his mind. “It’s not how you think it is,” he said. I felt uneasy, as if he were breaking some prearranged code and had started telling me a secret that I wasn’t supposed to know. “I’m happy with how things are, most of the time,” he said, and it was as if he were talking to someone else, trying to persuade them that what he was saying was true. Someone else, or himself, or a little of both. “So that question in your mind,” he said. “You might as well forget it.”

I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I really didn’t want to make something of it, even if there was a question in my mind, because it probably wasn’t the question he thought I wanted to ask. I didn’t need to know about his life, or what he did sexually, or what he wanted to do, or any of those things. I certainly didn’t want to know what the wrong party had been, or how he had come by his cuts and bruises. Some part of me was curious about him, but it was his happiness that I was curious about—because I thought he wanted me to imagine him as happy, and I wondered why it mattered to him. Or maybe I was just surprised that he seemed to believe that happiness was possible—and probably that was why I asked him the question I thought he wanted to hear, because, even on such short acquaintance, I liked him and I wished him well, at least. It was a piece of shorthand, I suppose, for all the other questions, the ones about happiness and being alone and getting home safe. It was also nothing at all. “Do you know what you’re doing?” I said.

The boy laughed. “Never,” he said, with a little too much emphasis. “But you have to pretend, Bill.” He regarded me for a moment. “If you don’t pretend,” he said, “you’re lost.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I understood anyway. He couldn’t do anything else, was what he meant. He couldn’t do anything different, and neither could anybody else. “Well,” I said. “You be careful now.”

He slid down off the seat and turned back toward me. “You, too, Bill,” he said. He’d said my name again, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know his. “Have a good Christmas,” he said.

“You, too,” I said. Then I slipped into gear, released the hand brake, and pulled away, leaving him there in the slow, dark sleet. I didn’t look back through the side mirror so I didn’t see what he did next, and it wasn’t until I was some miles farther down the road that I realized that he hadn’t wanted to talk about himself at all, but was just giving me something back, and I felt sorry not to have understood it at the time, but glad, too, because, out on the road, in the cold, any gift is better than nothing.

After I dropped the boy off, the weather cleared a little, and the last ten miles took next to no time. I liked that final stretch, the road going straight along the coast for a while, the water big and empty to the south, the fields and low hills above spotted with light here and there from farmsteads and faraway cottages. By the time I turned off and began climbing the rise toward home, the sleet had stopped altogether; a few miles farther, I came within sight of my own village, not much more than a row of houses straggling along a back road, a brief distraction on the way to somewhere else. The lights here always seemed dull and brownish in comparison with the fairy-tale silver of the lights I’d seen from the high road, and it struck me, sometimes, coming home late, that I knew the place too well. I knew all the stories. I knew what the people were doing behind those windows. I could see the abandoned dinner tables and the stone sculleries, the muddy boots on the doormat, the piles of newly opened letters on the sideboard, the silent men sitting in worn armchairs in the kitchen, watching television.

When I reached my own cottage, I parked the rig in the lay-by opposite and let myself in through the side gate, coming across the garden to the back door, which was always left unlocked. The house was silent, almost dark; the one lamp burning was in the dining room, a room we hardly ever used, preferring to eat in the creaturely warmth of the kitchen. I wasn’t surprised that Sall was in there, though: that was where we kept the things that her real life was made from—the best china and the family albums and the framed pictures from what she probably thought were better days. I opened the back door and went through the kitchen as quietly as I could—quieter, those last months, than I’d ever been before, as if the promise of death had revealed a carefulness in me that I’d never suspected—and I found Sall sleeping in the big armchair by the fireplace, a magazine on the floor by her feet, an empty mug cradled in her lap. Asleep like that, unguarded, her head leaning heavily to one side, she looked old and tired, but at least the worry that usually haunted her face was gone, and, as I stood watching her, it struck me that she was dreaming. I knew she would be upset if she woke up and found that I’d come home while she was sleeping, but I stood a moment longer, watching her dream and wondering how she had spent the day, what she had thought about, what she had done. After a moment, though, I felt uncomfortable spying on her like that, and I walked back through to the kitchen, to let her rest.

It was colder than ever now, but the sky had cleared, and a bright moon had emerged from the clouds, cold and white in a pool of indigo sky right above the garden. I put the kettle on, then I stepped outside and stood on the patio, looking over the fields to the stand of trees and the long stone wall that I knew were just beyond, black and irrefutably solid in the darkness. It was almost completely silent: from time to time, a dog barked at the end of the road, or the odd gust of wind caught in the beech hedge by Sall’s flower border; then, after a minute or so, the kettle began to sing quietly, and, as I felt the silence slipping away, I tried to capture it all, to drink it all in, before Sall woke up and I wasn’t alone anymore. This was my life, these were the times when I was true: in these half hours here and there when I felt alone in the house, or those fleeting moments out on the road, when I opened a gate and crossed an empty farmyard, a stranger, even to myself, in the quiet of the afternoon. The best part of the day was getting up at dawn and going down to the cool gray kitchen, the dark garden waiting at the door like some curious beast strayed in from the fields, a casual attentiveness in the coming light that seemed ready to include me, as it did everything else, in a soft, foreign stillness. That was the best, because I knew Sall would stay in bed until after I left, whether she was awake or not—though times like tonight were almost as good. It had become more frequent of late, this coming home and knowing that Sall was asleep somewhere, the magazine she had been reading slipped to the floor, a mug of tea cooling on a side table. It felt like coming home to another house, a place full of secrets, a childhood still there, intact among the green shadows under the stairs. First love, too—though not for Sall, as it happened, even though I’d never known anyone else, or not in that way. No: if thirty years of marriage and bringing up a child had taught me anything, it was that through everything, through all the Christmases and birthdays, through all the mishaps and misunderstandings, almost nothing had been shared. Everything that happened had happened to us separately, and, afterward, in my own mind, it all had a strangely abstract feel: a marriage inferred from picture books and Saturday matinées, a love that didn’t quite materialize, a series of other lives that had involved me for a while then shied away, the way an animal does when you make the wrong move and remind it of what you really are.

The kettle was whistling now, and I thought to leave it, so that Sall would have to get up and turn off the gas. That way, I could pretend I hadn’t seen her sleeping. It felt too close, seeing her like that. It was as if I were breaking the rules we had worked for years to set up, a system of small courtesies and avoidances and slow, fluid conversations that ran for days, pieces of hearsay and local news passed back and forth over meals and cups of tea to cover the bewildered quiet that had fallen upon us. It was awkward sometimes, but it did work, and it was better than any of the possible alternatives. For a moment, I thought of the boy on the road and wondered if it would ever come to this for him, if he would ever come home and find someone he cared for, but no longer loved, asleep in an armchair. It was a tender thought, I suppose, but it wasn’t sad, or sentimental, and it had nothing to do with death. It was just a notion, passing through my mind, while I waited for the kettle to stop whistling.

Only it didn’t stop, and after a while I walked back inside and turned off the gas myself. At exactly the same moment, Sall came through, her eyes bleary, an odd, faraway look on her face. She seemed surprised to see me, as if she hadn’t heard the kettle at all but had just woken up in what she thought was an empty house—and it struck me, for the first time, how difficult it would be for her, having me die first.

“You’re back,” she said. It sounded like an accusation. She glanced at the clock, but she didn’t say anything else.

“It was a long run,” I said. “I just got in.”

She nodded. “I haven’t made you anything,” she said. “I didn’t know when you’d be finished.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.”

She gave me a quick, scared look. “You’ve got to eat,” she said.

“I’ll have an omelette or something later,” I said. “I was just making coffee, if you want some.”

“I’ll make it,” she said. “You sit down. You’ve had a long day.”

I nodded, but I didn’t move. The door was still open, just enough that I could smell the cold outside, and I heard the dog barking—farther away now, it seemed, at the darker end of the road that ran past our house and into the hills, past the golden lights of farms and dairies and narrow sheep runs through the gorse, where snow was probably beginning to form—real snow this time, not the cold sleet I’d driven through in the woods where I met the boy. For a split second—no more—I wanted to get back in the rig and drive on, up into the darkness, into the origin of the approaching blizzard, just to be alone out there, the way that boy had been alone in the woods. Then, with Sall watching me curiously, and perhaps fearfully, I let go of that thought and went through to the living room, where the curtains were already drawn and the night was nothing more than a story to be told by a warm fire, with the radio humming quietly in the background, so that the world felt familiar and more or less happy, like the future that seemed possible when you didn’t think about dying, or the pastel-colored maps in a childhood atlas that you couldn’t help but go on trusting, even when you knew that they no longer meant what they said. ♦