“WHERE ARE WE GOING AGAIN AND WHY?” KIT ASKS. He’s dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, and it occurs to Leanne that he might be cold. She should ask him if he’d like to borrow a sweater from her father, but something is stopping her from being too solicitous. She is suspicious of the impulse. It’s obviously some sort of overcompensation.

“We need to go tell the people at the country club exactly how we want things arranged,” Leanne says. “The caterer is meeting us there with some things she wants us to taste. And then we have to stop by the florist and give them their check.”

“It’s only lunch,” Kit says. “Besides, I thought your mother already picked out all the food.”

“She did, but they want us to make some decision about sauces or something, I don’t know.” Leanne runs a hand through her hair. Another thing she was supposed to do was call a salon and make an appointment to have her hair properly put up for the wedding. She hadn’t thought it necessary, but at dinner last night Margaret assured her it was. Most brides, Margaret pointed out, would have had at least one practice session at the salon already.

“What are we driving?” Kit asks.

“Margaret’s car,” Leanne says.

Kit rolls his eyes. “Perfect,” he says dryly. Leanne giggles but immediately feels guilty. Laughing about Margaret’s stupid car and making sly jokes about the caterers and country-club people and florists is all well and good, but it implies that they’re in this together. And Leanne has not let Kit in on all of it.

“I need another cup of coffee first,” he says.

“I’m sorry about my mom’s Maxwell House,” Leanne tells him. “There’s not a Starbucks for miles.”

Kit holds his hands up, stopping her. “I adore Maxwell House,” he says. “You have no idea.”

“I’ll get you a to-go cup,” she says.

They drive in silence. The rain is still coming down lightly but steadily, enough to require the windshield wipers occasionally. Margaret’s car doesn’t have an intermittent setting, and the slowest speed is too fast, so Leanne pushes the wiper lever every twenty seconds or so. Kit looks at her sidelong but doesn’t say anything. The little Rabbit feels thin and metallic, an insufficient barrier between them and the elements. The engine is noisy, the dashboard flat and no-frills. Leanne wonders why Margaret would have agreed to drive it all the way up to Michigan.

You know, Kit, I’m a drunk, she could say.

“It’s not a very impressive landscape, is it?” Kit says. He’s looking out the window at the flat fields, mushy with rain and dotted with run-down barns and outbuildings. They have just passed the old Vandenburg farm. The house, a flat brown structure with peeling, scraped siding, has an orange couch on the front porch. There’s an old Gremlin and a truck in the driveway, along with two mangy dogs. A blue snowmobile in the corner of the front yard wears a handwritten sign: FOR SALE.

“It gets prettier north of here,” Leanne says. “The U.P. is really gorgeous.”

“But why?” he asks.

“Why is the U.P. gorgeous?”

“No, why did your father come back here? It’s not exactly my old Kentucky home.”

Leanne can’t tell if he’s being facetious or if he truly wants to know.

“Our dad always said that when he was a boy, he used to look up while he was plowing and see airplanes overhead and all he wanted was to be up there, in the sky,” she says. “So he went off and became a pilot. And he found himself flying over Michigan and looking down and seeing tractors in fields, and all he wanted was to be down there, on a farm.” She pauses. She’s heard the story countless times, but now it seems to explain something, something she’d love Kit to understand.

“He was malcontent,” she says. “And he dragged my mother along with him.”

Kit gazes out at the miserable homesteads, the rain-battered corn drooping in saggy rows. “I guess it looks better from above,” he says.

The country club is on the outskirts of Kalamazoo. As they near it, the fields drop away, and the landscape begins to look more suburban. There are neighborhoods with curving streets and boxy new homes on large lots.

“All of this used to be farmland,” Leanne tells Kit, “but farmers have been selling their land in small parcels. It’s worth more as residential real estate than it is as agricultural land.”

Kit nods. “Tough luck on your dad,” he says. “I guess you really can’t go home again.”

Surprised, Leanne nods. She’d never thought about it that way.

A long driveway through a sloping lawn heralds the entrance to the club. The building itself is old, probably built in the sixties, in the faux-colonial style that was current then. Behind it there’s a small lake. The golf courses are to the left. They pass a small bank of tennis courts and park as near the door as they can.

They are given a cheerful midwestern welcome. The events coordinator introduces herself as Lori, an energetic blonde a bit younger than Leanne. They follow her around, nodding in acquiescence to all of her plans: the tables laid out in a circular pattern, the bridal table here, the cake table in the corner. Her energy is so enormous, her manner so confident, that to suggest any changes—a little less frippery for the cake, a smaller bridal table—would be trying to derail a speeding locomotive.

They go outside to see her layout for the ceremony itself, Lori grabbing one of the club’s golf umbrellas from behind the main desk.

“Here,” she says, “one of these is plenty big for newlyweds-to-be!”

Kit holds the umbrella. Leanne takes his arm awkwardly. It’s like they’re becoming the bride and groom on top of the cake. It makes her feel all the more uncomfortable for the false pretenses under which she’s here.

Lori shows them the strings in the grass where she has measured out the space for the chairs. “Now, don’t you worry about that,” she says. “They’re all safe and dry in the basement, and our boys will set them up just before the ceremony so they don’t get wet. Not that it’s going to rain! I’m sure you’re going to have a perfect day!”

She leads them to the trellis arch where the minister will perform the ceremony.

“We’re ready for anything here,” she says cheerily. “Big Catholic weddings, little private ceremonies with a justice of the peace. Yours is easy. Our last couple was Latvian. Russian Orthodox! Boy, did they have a complicated ceremony! But we had everything they needed. We even have a chuppah for Jewish weddings!” She beams at them, pleased to have such a tangible expression of the club’s open-mindedness.

How about an imam? Leanne wants to say. We’re Muslim, you know. It would amuse Kit. In fact, she realizes, it’s something he would say, not she. She glances at him sidelong. He’s looking at Lori in a genial way, absent all his usual archness.

The grass is sodden, and Leanne’s feet sink into it as they walk back toward the building. Its squishiness mirrors how she feels. What are we doing? she thinks. Kit is clearly playing the good bride-groom to make Leanne feel better, but it’s only making her feel worse, as if the dry, witty man she loves has had his brain rewired by earnest midwesterners. Maybe he doesn’t even want to go to Mexico anymore. Maybe he just wants to go back to Cold Spring and be a video editor. She glances at him again. No, this is Kit, the real Kit. He really does want to be married.

But that’s only because he doesn’t know her. He thinks she’s good wife material, a sweet, crafty girl who has had the ambition and energy to go out and start her own business, when she’s a self-destructive, lazy girl whose mother bailed her out and set her up in a store to keep her from being a total loss. He thinks she’s going to walk cheerily down the aisle and become a nice wife who will run her little store and keep him company while he zips around making prizewinning documentary features. And why shouldn’t he expect that? He has been completely clear from day one about his hopes and dreams. He’s like everyone else in her family.

How can I be sure I want to do this? she wants to scream at Kit as he climbs the wooden stairs to the country club’s porch, looking solid and confident and calm. How can I be sure of anything?

“Now,” Lori says, relieving them of their umbrella when they get inside, “the caterers are here with some samples, and boy, I can tell you one thing! You’re in for a treat!”

Wheel disk, post-hole digger, sickle mower. A neat row, like birds on a telephone wire. The three pieces of equipment have been sitting in front of the barn for the last three months. Carol has asked Will to put them in the barn several times, and every time he has said okay, then promptly forgotten. He knows this drives Carol crazy, but he doesn’t do it, as she seems to think, on purpose. He just forgets, because in the end, it’s not clear to him why moving them should be so important.

But that’s not entirely true, he tells himself as he heads out the back door toward the barn, pulling up his sweatshirt hood against the light rain. He understands all too well. Carol doesn’t want anyone looking out back and being reminded that this is a farm.

He stops and contemplates the three hunks of metal, figuring out where to start. They are unsightly, he has to give her that. The post-hole digger looks like an oversize corkscrew, and the wheel disk squats on the grass like a discarded set of false teeth. The sickle mower is downright frightening, with its sawlike blade sticking up in the air as if waiting to drop down on some toddler’s unsuspecting head. Carol is right, they should all be in the barn. It’s better for them, anyway. The wheel disk is going to start rusting if it sits out in the rain much longer.

He starts with the post-hole digger, because it’s the smallest piece. He gets himself under the tall end and drags it toward the barn.

“Damn it,” he says as he gets to the barn and realizes he hasn’t opened the door. He sets the digger down and gets his foot in between the doors, shoving the right door aside. It roars on its track. His father’s barn door made the same sound. It’s almost a surprise to see the interior of his own, larger barn instead of the small one he grew up with. He looks inside, letting his eyes adjust to the light. He should probably move some things around, make enough room for the three pieces of equipment. They’re awkward and oddly shaped. He shoves the flatbed wagon backward a few feet, then moves some large spelts barrels to the side.

He goes back out and gets under the post-hole digger again, giving it a friendly pat as he does. He’s always appreciated equipment. His father taught him how to fix a tractor when he was barely seven. Will liked knowing how one part led to another part, how the fuel worked its way through and caused the small explosions that moved the machine forward. It made his first Air Force job in the motor pool easy. He felt even stronger about airplanes. Up until the 767, he got excited every time the airline ordered new planes. Just three years before ceasing to exist, TWA put in its largest aircraft order ever, 717s and Airbuses. It was an optimistic moment. They had finally gotten rid of Carl Icahn, who had been milking TWA dry to line his own wallet. The airline was employee-owned, and a pilot had been named CEO. Customer service and on-time performance had improved, because the employees were giving it their all. Will thought then they were finally going to make it work. Shows how much he ever knew.

“Hah,” he says, shoving the post-hole digger into the spot he’s made for it.

He goes back outside and starts at the sight of Margaret, standing in the rain, her hands in her pockets and her shoulders shrugged up close to her ears.

“I thought I’d give you a hand,” she says.

“Well, okay.” He wonders if Carol sent her out. Go make sure your father gets those things inside.

“Let’s get this disk in the barn. I can pull it around by the hitch and get it through if you can open the door a little wider.” He expects her to object, to insist on helping drag the thing, but she only nods and goes to the door. There’s something stiff and anxious about her bearing. Maybe it’s just the rain.

Luckily, the disk rolls easily when Will pulls it. He goes in a large circle to get it lined up straight on with the door, then ducks his head and pulls it quickly inside.

“Look out!” Margaret grabs on to the frame from behind to help slow it down and keep it from crashing into the flatbed wagon. It pulls her a short distance, the soles of her shoes scuffing as they slide across the cement floor. She laughs, looking for that instant like a child again. Will’s heart lightens. He brushes raindrops off his sleeve.

“I’m getting wet,” he says. “I’ve got a jacket in the tack room. I’m going to go put that on.”

The tack room hasn’t been used for tack since Leanne sold her horse and moved to New York. Will used to love the way it smelled, the saddles all soaped and shiny on their sawhorses, bridles and leads hanging on the walls. It was like the girls’ clubhouse in those years when their world centered on horses; they hung ribbons from horse shows and pictures torn out of horse magazines on the white walls.

Now there are only a few leads left, hanging forlornly on the wall. The saddles and bridles have all been sold. At some point Margaret pulled down all the ribbons and stored them away somewhere, but the magazine pictures are still there, brittle and yellow with age. Will has been using the room to store random items. He wrestles his sweatshirt off, tosses it over one of the sawhorses. He takes his work coat from one of the pegs and shrugs into it.

Margaret is outside surveying the sickle mower when he comes back. “This thing looks lethal,” she says. “But I think if you pull on that side and I guide it around, there’s a small chance we can avoid decapitating ourselves.” Will nods and leans over to grab his side of the frame. Slowly, they rotate the mower without moving the blade.

“So what do you think of Kit?” Margaret says as they begin shoving the mower toward the barn door. Will is surprised. Is she just making small talk, or does she really care what he thinks? Maybe she’s trying to open a conversation about something else, something that relates to her.

“I don’t know,” he says, grasping for the right answer. What does he think of Kit? The kid seems sure of himself, but that’s just youth. If there’s anything about Kit that bothers Will, it’s that he seems to watch and listen more than other men his age. It strikes Will as somehow cautious, and that makes him suspicious. Then again, it could be a good quality, couldn’t it?

“I don’t know,” he says again. “Seems nice enough, I guess.” It’s what his own father would have said, he realizes upon hearing it. Margaret glances up at him, and he wonders if she heard that echo, too. She stands up and brushes her hands together. The mower is lined up with its buddies.

“Okay, then,” she says. “It’s all inside now. That should give Mom about ten minutes of satisfaction.” She smiles at him and he grins back, accepting the brief moment of complicity. Then it’s over, and she puts her hands on her hips. “I’d forgotten about this barn,” she says, surveying the place like a real estate agent. “It’s funny to think how much time Leanne and I spent out here. Those long summer days. Where’d all that time go?”

“It comes back to you,” Will says. “As you get older. You start getting it all back.”

Margaret’s gaze comes back to him, and she stands there taking him in. Her eyes narrow with thought. After a moment, her face softens, as if she remembers she’s seeing her father, someone she need not figure out.

“You think so?” she says, and a light smile touches the corners of her mouth. “Well, I need to get into the shower, or I’ll never be ready to help with the cooking. See you inside!” She lifts a hand toward her face, a funny half salute, then turns and heads back outside, but pauses at the open doors. “Don’t forget your sweatshirt,” she says.

Will stands alone in the barn, next to his mower. The only illumination comes from the open doors; the day’s gray light is too weak to penetrate the dusty haymow windows a level above. He feels oddly abandoned. Here he stands at the center of his domain, yet no longer at the center of anything. He’s a king, Lear in a brown Carhartt coat. Who loves me best? He opens a hand and examines it. Here I am, a living, breathing creature. Taking up space in the present.

The barn smells dank and metallic, more like oil than animals. Will closes his eyes and summons his father’s barn, the way it smelled when, as a boy, he slid the door open on a summer day. There was first the cool, muddy smell of the concrete floor, then the sweet pungency of the hay, and then the musky, manure-like smell of two pigs and two cows. Behind that was the sweeter, sweaty smell of their solid old horse and the acrid smell of chickens in the attached coop. He can smell all of it, right here, standing in his own barn, a barn that hasn’t seen an animal in fifteen years, except for mice and swallows. Those old smells are as real to him as anything he can smell today. And what, he asks himself, does that say about the present, about its bossy assertion that it, and only it, can be here now?

Margaret is in the shower when the phone rings. She’s already exhausted. After her mother had her bring a ton of things up from the basement, she asked Margaret to go out and take the padding off all the deck furniture and hang it in the garage in hopes that it might dry out. With Kit and Leanne off at the country club, Carol had become obsessed with the yard.

“Mom, it’s going to be dark,” Margaret said. “No one will be able to see it.”

“They will at the beginning,” Carol said. “They’ll all be wandering around looking out the back windows at the beginning, and it will still be light outside. I know. You act like I’ve never had cocktail parties here before.”

Margaret sighed and went out to weed the flower beds, as her mother wanted, but that didn’t take long, because there were hardly any weeds. When she walked around the house to check the backyard beds, she saw her father lugging the old, unsightly pieces of farm equipment into the barn. Something squeezed her heart at the sight of him, hunched over in the rain like an old man. She went to help. By the time she came back into the house, it was time to eat lunch. Will was fed a sandwich and sent to Kalamazoo to pick up his tuxedo and more groceries. Margaret collected Trevor from the playroom, and the two of them sat down with Carol for some canned tomato soup.

“This is great!” Trevor said happily. Margaret’s heart always sank when she saw how happily her son, who got homemade bread and organic vegetables at home, ate awful, prepackaged junk. High-fructose corn syrup, she told herself. It’s irresistible.

But the tomato soup tasted good even to her, sweet and warming. She split a cookie with Trevor after the soup, and let him sit on her lap to eat it. Against her sweaty skin, he seemed impossibly clean and soft. She rested her chin on the top of his head and breathed in the smell of his hair.

When she came up to shower, it was with a sense of having made progress toward the ultimate goal: getting Leanne married without having Carol melt down.

She is under the water, rinsing her hair, almost content, when she hears her mother’s shout. “Margie! Telephone!”

She turns off the shower and stands there, not wanting to have heard it.

“It’s your husband!”

Acid fills her stomach. Can she tell him to call back? No, that will just prolong the agony. Better to get it over with. Besides, maybe he’s calmed down. Maybe they can have a reasonable conversation that will move them toward some sort of rapprochement. There’s even still time for him to get here, to act as though nothing has happened. Clinging to that flicker of hope, she wraps a towel around herself and, dripping heavily, goes to the upstairs extension in her parents’ room. Vasant, she reminds herself. His hands. His eyes.

“I’ve got it,” she shouts before easing the door shut.

“So.” David’s voice is cold, and the minute she hears it, Margaret’s heart begins to thud loudly. He’s still angry. He’s still that other person, the one who threatened her. Her hands begin to sweat, making the receiver slippery. She wipes her free hand on the towel she’s wearing and switches ears.

“So,” she says, striving to make her voice sound normal. “How are things?”

He laughs. It isn’t a pleasant sound. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he asks.

Margaret feels dizzy. “Yes, I do,” she manages to say. “I’ve come to my parents’ home to attend my sister’s wedding.” She can hear him breathing on the other end. “As we planned,” she adds, but it sounds lame and defensive. Her breath catches, and she swallows hard. She can’t let herself be intimidated.

“The police were still here when I got back,” he says. “They were knocking on the door.”

“David …” Margaret doesn’t know what she wants to say, but she has to say something. It’s going to be her only chance.

“They were knocking on the door,” he says, determined not to be sidetracked. “They asked me who I was, and I said I was your husband.”

“Okay.” She won’t be able to do anything besides let him get through the story, she can see that.

“They asked me to unlock the apartment so they could have a look around. They stood right next to me with their hands on their guns. I could tell what they thought.”

“David, it doesn’t matter what they thought. They have to think that way, they’re police officers.”

He isn’t listening to her. “I could tell that they thought I had done something to you. They were just waiting to have to arrest me.”

Margaret can feel tears filling her eyes, not for David but for the awfulness of the whole situation. She regulates her breathing carefully so he won’t hear her crying.

“So we got inside, and I saw that you had left a note on the table by the door. I picked it up and put it in my pocket so the police wouldn’t see it.”

This confuses Margaret. She dashed the note off quickly—I’ve taken Trevor to my parents for Leanne’s wedding. We can talk when I get back on Sunday. I don’t want to fight. M.—but she doesn’t understand why he would hide it from the police.

David continues. “So they looked around the whole apartment, and they saw there was no one else there, and then they asked me what had happened. I said that we had argued about you sleeping with my colleague, and I had left to get some air. When I got back, you were gone. And then I said, ‘Oh my God, our son!’”

“What are you talking about, David? You knew Trevor was with me.”

“I ran upstairs and looked for him. I told them he was gone. The police asked if I had any idea where you had gone, and I said no, none. And then I started crying.”

It’s a confession, but it’s bragging, too. David is describing his next move in the game she started unintentionally when she called 911.

“You know what, Margaret? They started to feel bad for me then. They said I should contact a lawyer. They said if you had taken Trevor out of state to hide him from me, it could be kidnapping. They said I had rights.”

The full horror of the call is dawning on Margaret. “But David, you knew exactly where I had gone. I left that note for you. I wasn’t trying to take Trevor away from you, I was going to my sister’s wedding!” She despises the rising tone of desperation in her voice.

“What note?” David says, and even in his cold, flat tone, there’s a glimmer of triumph.

Words crowd into her head, but she stops herself from speaking. You were threatening me! I was scared of you! She breathes deeply and tries to make her voice calm, reasonable. “David, what are you trying to do?”

There’s a pause as David seems to consider this question. Margaret’s mind races, trying to come up with something she can do or say that might jolt him out of this, might make him see the absurdity and awfulness of turning their unhappiness into all-out war.

“I’m doing the only thing I can do,” he says. “I’m fighting to get my son back.”

“But you haven’t lost him! Why are you saying this?” It doesn’t escape Margaret’s notice that he says nothing about getting his wife back, and she doesn’t bring it up, either.

“Goodbye, Margaret,” David says. She waits, tensed, for him to say something that would be in keeping with the melodramatic tone of the conversation: I’ll see you in court or Have a nice life. But there’s just silence, and then a click as he hangs up. The phone sounds empty. Margaret clings to the receiver, unwilling to accept that the conversation is over, with no chance of bringing it to a better end. After a few moments, the off-the-hook tone starts warbling.

Margaret returns the phone to its cradle and sits down on the edge of her parents’ bed. She feels completely drained. She can’t get the energy to walk to the bathroom and finish drying off. Numb, she slumps over to her side. She closes her eyes, but she’s too drained even to cry.

After knocking several times, Carol comes in and finds her there.

“Margaret, honey, what’s wrong?” she says. She sits down by Margaret’s side. Margaret feels herself sliding toward the hollow her mother makes.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

“Why don’t you start by telling me what’s going on,” Carol says.

Margaret opens her eyes. “You can’t tell anyone else,” she says.

“Of course not.”

Margaret doesn’t know where to begin. She’s afraid that if she opens her mouth, a pathetic, childlike wail will find its way out.

“It’s okay,” Carol says. “Whatever it is, we’ll try to sort it out.”

“It can’t be sorted out,” Margaret says. “There’s no sorting it out.”

“Then we’ll just deal with it.”

Margaret puts her hand over her eyes. She shivers, freezing from lying there damp and barely covered up. She wiggles her toes to try and work them under the blanket. Her whole body is shaking with cold. She can’t bear another second of not being under the covers.

“Whatever it is, Margaret, I’m on your side.” Carol sits there, emanating an unusual patience. I’m on your side. Margaret repeats the words in her head, trying to squeeze some comfort from them. Her mother is on her side. She always has been. Although why should she be? Every choice Margaret has made has been a direct rejection of the life her mother has lived.

She gets her feet under her parents’ blanket. Shakily, she reaches a hand down and pulls it toward her chin. She gets herself covered and huddles there, trying to focus as much of her consciousness as possible on the awareness of the blanket’s softness against her skin, the small warmth beginning to grow underneath it.

“I’ve been asleep,” she says. “I’ve been like a person asleep at the wheel.”

“That’s okay,” Carol says softly, in a lullaby voice. “You’re awake now.”

The country club is all set, tables, chairs, trellis all ready to go. The florist has been paid. The caterers know what sauce to use with the salmon and which wine to serve with the soup. Everything has been arranged, and Kit and Leanne are almost home, driving in the rain without speaking. Leanne has never felt more uncertain about the wedding happening.

“Well,” Kit says, as she pulls into the driveway and stops the car, “I guess the wheels are in motion, aren’t they?”

Leanne turns off the car. Rain runs in tearlike trails down the windshield. “I think I’ll take a walk,” she says.

“An excellent plan.” Kit’s voice is light. “Stop and smell the wet roses for me, would you?” He pulls the handle and shoves his shoulder against Margaret’s sticky passenger door. “I’m going to go in there,” he says as he gets the door open, “and ransack the cupboards, because I’m sure that somewhere, hiding, leftover from a holiday basket or an office party or the visit of some previous gourmand, there’s a bag of whole coffee beans. And I’m going to find it and make some coffee. So don’t be too long.” He climbs out of the car. “Tallyho!” he cries as he slams the door.

Leanne sits at the wheel, watching Kit walk to the front door and enter the house. He seems to be becoming a part of the family even as Leanne feels she’s drifting away from him. She rests her forehead on the steering wheel and closes her eyes.

After a few moments, she picks her head up and is surprised to see eyes regarding her from the porch.

“Trevor, what are you doing there?” she asks as she gets out of the car.

“Is it raining now?” he asks, and Leanne notices that the rain has stopped. The sky is still a grayish white and the day still gloomy, but for the first time since she arrived, there’s nothing falling. Still, the air feels so damp it might as well be raining.

Leanne runs her fingers through her hair. “No, it’s not raining anymore,” she says, walking over to her nephew.

Trevor looks up at the sky. His brow furrows with concentration, making him look like Margaret. The blond hair at the crown of his head swirls around in a perfect miniature spiral. He stands there, head tilted back, studying the sky. His face moves up and back, as if he’s trying to take in every inch of it. She watches as he looks up, up, up, until he goes too far and tips over backward, falling onto his behind. Trying not to laugh, Leanne squats down to make sure he’s okay. He doesn’t seem to mind.

“The clouds are really the rain,” he says. “They’re the rain waiting to fall from inside the air.”

“That’s right.” She smiles at him. She’s always felt comfortable around kids, more so than Margaret. It’s funny that Margaret was the one to have the first grandchild. Whenever they used to go to restaurants or other places where there were rowdy kids, Margaret always fixed them with an icy stare. “Don’t people even try to control their kids anymore?” she would mutter.

“You want to come outside and play?” Leanne asks Trevor. He smiles at her as if he has been waiting for exactly this.

“Yes,” he says calmly. “I want to.”

“Do you want to play ball?” Leanne is trying to remember whether there are some toys in the garage.

“I want to see the barn,” he says.

Leanne looks at the front door. “Maybe we should ask your mother first,” she says. “The barn is kind of dirty.”

“No,” the boy says, grave. “You shouldn’t ask my mother.”

“Why not?”

“Grandma says she’s sleeping and not to bother her.”

“Oh.” Leanne stands there, unsure what to do. Oh heck, she thinks, the barn’s not so dirty with all the animals gone.

“All right,” she says, holding out a hand. “I’ll take you to see the barn.”

They stop in the garage to check on the doves. The larger one is no longer holding his wing in a funny way, though he still seems subdued. The other one scrabbles around, rustling in the seed shells at the bottom of the cage.

“Those are Grandma’s birds,” Trevor says, watching them.

They walk outside again and go around to the back of the house, where the large deck extends out toward the barn.

“My dad built that deck,” Leanne tells Trevor, “when I was really little. Your mom was about your age.”

“Grandpa Will is my mom’s dad,” he says, serious with the knowledge, but his attention is focused on the large barn as they draw near it.

“Those big doors are for tractors,” Leanne says. “And this small one is for people.”

“Which one do horses use?”

Leanne laughs. “ Either one,” she says. “We used to take them in the small door and straight back to their stalls.”

“What’s a stall?”

“I’ll show you.”

The door creaks as Leanne pushes it open. A thousand memories crowd into her head. Taking her horse out, cleaned and groomed, to put her on a trailer for the horse show. Riding out for an afternoon jaunt, ducking her head down to go under the lintel. Rubbing saddle soap into bridles in the little tack room. The smell of it fills her nostrils. Strange, how physical sensation can reside in a place and just reappear.

“That’s where the saddles and bridles were always kept,” she tells Trevor, pushing open the tack-room door. He looks in hopefully.

“They’re gone now,” she says. “We sold them when we sold the animals.”

“What’s that?” He’s pointing to a large round bin.

“That’s where we kept the spelts. That’s sort of a treat for horses—like cookies for you.”

“It’s a big cookie jar!” He laughs, pleased with himself, then follows her to the row of stalls at the back.

“My horse lived there,” she says, pointing, “and your mom’s lived over there. But they spent most of the summer out in the pasture.” She shows him the door to the pasture, how the stalls could be opened to let the horses go freely in and out. She leans on the stall gate, staring at the open door to the pasture. The smell of the pasture grass on a hot summer day, the buzzing of flies around her, the roughness of a lead rope wrapped around her hand. In the summer sometimes, they rode in shorts and sneakers, the damp warmth of the horses’ bodies pressed against their bare legs.

“I love horses!” Trevor cries, a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm. His shriek is immediately lost in the barn’s emptiness.

“This room is where we brought the hay in for them to eat,” she says, leading him into the large tractor room. Above them, the hayloft windows let in a fraction of the day’s white light. The air seems to be filled, even now, with tiny motes, particles of hay perhaps, so that everything looks slightly out of focus.

“We can go up in the hayloft!” Trevor breathes.

“I don’t know if we should do that,” Leanne says. “It’s dirty up there, and it’s dangerous for little kids. You might fall down.”

“I won’t fall down. I’ll be very very careful.” He is almost whispering, as if telling her a secret. Leanne eyes the hayloft ladder. It’s not a ladder, really, just thick planks nailed to the wall, entering the loft through a small square cut in the floor. Going up it was always scary—you emerged into the hayloft and reached your foot over from the plank ladder to the hayloft floor—but going down was worse. Then you had to reach one foot out over the square hole in the floor and let it fall onto the plank. For one dizzying moment, you were stepping onto nothing.

The first time Leanne went up to the hayloft, she refused to come down. She remembers seeing the hole in the floor and knowing there was no way she was going to take that step. The ground was so far down she couldn’t even see it. Her cousin Eddie was there, and he and Margaret made fun of her, but she wouldn’t budge. She was going to stay in that hayloft forever. Eventually, Eddie’s stepfather, Uncle Rem, came up and got her, hefting her over his shoulder like a sack of wheat.

“That ladder is difficult,” she says. “It’s really only for grown-ups.” Trevor looks up at her and his face is filled with disappointment.

“There’s nothing up there to see,” she tells him.

“I really, really want to see the hayloft,” he says, pressing his lips together and squinting at her as if he’s sorry to have to break it to her. Leanne almost laughs.

“Oh, all right,” she says. “But you’ll see, it’s scary.” It will serve him right if he gets just as terrified as she did.

She follows him over to the ladder and gets him started on the first rung, which is high off the ground. His stubby arms and legs begin climbing so quickly that she has to hurry and get on herself so she can stay right behind him. This is really stupid, she tells herself. What if Trevor falls and breaks his arm? Margaret would be furious.

“Be careful, Trevor,” she says.

He slows down when he reaches hayloft level. The ladder keeps on going; there’s another level above this one, stretching toward the other end of the barn, but Leanne doesn’t tell him that.

“Stop there,” she says, and then she climbs up so she’s right behind him, her feet on either side of his on the same rung. “Take my hand,” she says, and he does. He holds her hand and reaches a leg for the hayloft floor. It’s just barely long enough to reach. With one leg on the floor and one leg on the ladder rung, he starts to feel scared—she can feel his body tighten and his motions grow jerky.

“Wait, wait,” he starts to say, but she lets go of his hand and pushes his butt to shove him into the hayloft. She pushes a little too hard, and he stumbles forward onto his hands and knees. Quickly, she steps over to the hayloft floor herself.

“There, look at you!” she says, before he can get upset. “You’re in the hayloft now!”

Trevor stands up and looks around, satisfied. “Wow,” he breathes. He heads for the edge.

“Don’t go anywhere near that edge,” Leanne says, surprised at the command in her tone.

Trevor freezes and looks back at her. “Please take me over there so I can see over the edge?” he asks.

That’s Margaret’s training, Leanne thinks, and for once she’s grateful for her sister’s bossiness. “Sure,” she says, catching up to him. “Here, hold my hand.”

They walk to about two feet from the edge and look over. A few farm implements are parked below; she recognizes a disk tiller. Farther over, there’s a red canoe hanging between two of the barn’s rough-hewn posts and a small sailboat under a tarp. There was a short period when Carol decided the girls should learn to sail, but all the lakes in the area are small and don’t get much wind, so they quickly lost interest.

“We’re up high,” Trevor says.

“Pretty high,” Leanne answers.

“But buildings are higher.”

“Yes.”

“Chicago has the Sears Tower,” Trevor says. “That’s one of the tallest buildings in the world.”

“That’s right,” Leanne tells him. “They built that when I was a baby.”

“New York had the Twin Towers,” Trevor says. “But some airplanes came and knocked them down.”

Leanne looks down at him. “That’s right,” she says. “That was very sad.” It feels insufficient. Suddenly, she wants to cry. How would it be for a four-year-old to know such awful things about the world? Leanne has never before considered what an exercise in uncertainty being a mother must be. It must be hard for Margaret.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Trevor says.

Leanne laughs. “Okay,” she tells him. “Come on. I’ll put you on the ladder.”

Trevor is surprisingly calm about going back down. Leanne gets on the ladder first, then reaches out to take his hand, and he steps easily over and starts right down. He must really have to go.

On their way out, she notices that the tack-room door has swung open again. She’s about to shut it when she sees a sweatshirt lying on the floor inside. It’s the one her father was wearing earlier; he must have taken it off out here and forgotten it. When she picks it up, an envelope falls out of the pocket. Leaning over to retrieve it, she sees the return address: Cathay Pacific Airways.

He must have bought some tickets. A surprise for her mother perhaps, to celebrate his retirement. The thrill of being in on a happy secret flickers through her. She turns the envelope over. It’s open.

She’s surprised to see that the contents are pages and not tickets. Before it occurs to her that she shouldn’t be reading it, her eyes have flicked over the first paragraph.

We are pleased to offer you the position of first officer at Cathay Pacific Airways. Please call Jim Chan in our New York office to discuss the details of your assignment …

No one expects her father even to consider flying past retirement. They all expect him to retire and settle in on the farm, as he has always said he couldn’t wait to do. And Cathay Pacific. Is he planning to move to Asia? Obviously, her mother doesn’t know anything about it.

Leanne’s heart pounds. She never should have looked. Quickly, she stuffs the letter back in the envelope and the envelope back in the sweatshirt. Her hands shake slightly. She rolls the sweatshirt up in a ball and puts it under her arm.

“Okay, let’s go,” she says to Trevor, who is pacing back and forth like a tiny basketball coach. He follows her eagerly. When she opens the barn door, she sees that the hard rain has started again. She holds the crumpled-up sweatshirt over her head for protection, then reaches for Trevor’s hand.

“Come on, run!”