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good, Arla,” Charlie said, drunk. “You get sick of being married to my brother, you know where to find me.” Dean slapped him on the head and reached for another beer.
    That night, she and Dean made love in the darkened bedroom. Arla ran her hands along Dean’s arms and across his back, and then she put her hands on his face, steadied him, tried to see in the faint light if his blue eyes were meeting hers, but he turned his head to the side and moved above her, breathing hard. “Dean,” she whispered. “Shhhh,” he said, and when he was finished he said nothing more and fell asleep. She pulled on her nightclothes, lay back, and blinked into shadows.
    Then the terrible suspicion came to Arla again, as it had every night since the accident, but this time it was more than a suspicion. It was a conviction, a certainty, a truth as pure and unchangeable as gravity, and it was this: for the first time in her life, she was imperfect. And Dean, who had needed her for her perfection, would never need her again. It was so simple, so clear. He didn’t need her. She stared at the ceiling and marveled at the colossal power of this understanding, how she knew, right here on these musty sheets at the age of eighteen, that the life she had known was over, and that she was, after all those years and all that evidence pointing to the contrary, nothing special at all.
    Later, as Dean slept, Arla walked to the bathroom and looped her cane over an exposed pipe near the bathtub. A November nor’easter was blowing in, and the drafts ran unchecked through the house. She thought of Drusilla Jane, out in the dark windy scrub, friendless, alone. She would go see her tomorrow. Nobody should be all alone. And then Arla sat down on the toilet, stared at the crotch of her underwear, where there should, by now, have been a blooming red stain, but where there was only fresh white cotton. She stood up and pressed the flat of her hand into the soft flesh of her belly, pressed deep in, searching, until she felt it—a tightening, a gathering, a beginning.

JULY

O NE
    A scrub jay cried outside, frantic for territory, or for love. Frank Bravo turned over to squint at the clock on the bureau. It was 6:14 A.M . Saturday. Fourth of July. The alarm would buzz at 6:30; he needed to get to the restaurant early to start prepping the holiday rush. But now he rolled back and stared at the ceiling, thinking of Elizabeth, about whom he’d just had a highly erotic dream. It wasn’t the sex that was lingering in the front of his brain, making his vision foggy and his chest warm. It was the prelude, where they’d met on a deserted high school football field—probably Utina High, come to think of it—in the rain, and they had taken each other’s hands and run up into the bleachers. It was the way they’d sat down, close together, only the bleachers had now turned into the inside of a truck cab, and Elizabeth was in the driver’s seat, and the rain pelted the windows, and everything smelled like jasmine. She’d turned to him. “It’s time,” she said. “We’ve waited long enough.” She brushed a wet strand of hair off his forehead. That was the part that stuck with him, that part just before the sex. Elizabeth. His brother Carson’s wife. Love, or territory. That was it, wasn’t it?
    “Shit,” he said now. Gooch’s collar jingled lightly as he picked his head up off the bed to regard Frank. “I said ‘shit,’” Frank said. “But it didn’t concern you.” He thumped the dog’s back. “And what are you doing on the bed, anyway?” It was a rhetorical question. Gooch, all sixty muttish pounds of him, had been sleeping on the bed every night for the past nine years. Gooch put his head back down, sighed a huge dog sigh, a sound like air escaping from compression brakes.
    The day’s first soft wash of light had begun to creep up the walls, and Frank waited for a moment, tried to let his eyes adjust. Outside the bedroom window, the jasmine was