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the middle of the road. When the car was a good quarter of a mile away, however, it turned off at the Lonsdorf place.
    “I must go in,” she said. “Dagny waits up.” Sonja took a step back and bowed slightly. “So I will thank you now for the . . . for the wonderful apple feast.”
    She had barely finished her little speech when Henry moved to close the distance between them. He tried to kiss her, but Sonja had time to lift her fingers into the space between their lips.
    “No, I think tonight—just apples.”
    Before Henry could form a response, either argument or apology, she was gone, hastening toward her little room under Dagny Singstad’s roof. For another moment, Henry remained in the road, analyzing the language of her rebuff. Tonight—just apples. Was any other meaning possible—on another night, there would be more than apples?
    Henry walked back the way they came. Even in the dark, he could tell when he reached the place in the orchard where he was as far from any path leading in as any leading out. Here he stepped into the space between two trees that grew so close their upper branches tangled and made it impossible to tell which apples belonged on which tree. Henry unbuckled his trousers. He spit twice into his hand to oil its motion up and down his cock. He had had women before, but now he scarcely went further in his mind than the thought of coming up behind Sonja Skordahl, pulling her dress from her shoulders, and baring her bosom. Just when he imagined reaching around her to cup her breasts, ripe and heavy in his hands as fruit about to fall, his semen burst from him with such force that he was staggered on his feet.
    The following morning,
Sonja left the house at first light. She entered once again the House family orchard, and she gathered up in her apron as many of the apples as she could find that she and Henry had scattered the night before. She worried that someone from Henry’s family might be able to follow the trail of once- or twice-bitten fruit and see that it led toward Dagny’s. Eventually they would learn that Sonja herself was responsible for such thievery and worse, such waste. They would never approve of such a woman.
    She found a mound of soft dirt between two apple trees, and with her fingers she scraped out a depression deep enough to bury the apples. Each apple bore either a small or large scar, depending on whether the teeth that sunk into it had been hers or Henry’s. The last apple she pushed into the hole was his, and before she covered it, she ran her finger around the rim of the bite mark where the peel, like human skin, puckered around its wound and tried to heal itself.
    When Sonja reported to work, Axel banished her to the kitchen to wash dishes for the remainder of her shift. He had noticed her hands, and he would not allow someone with dirt under her fingernails to serve food to his paying customers.

7
    Mrs. House could have taken her prospective daughter-in-law aside almost any time in the weeks before the wedding. She could still have spoken to Sonja at the church, in the hour before the ceremony, when the two of them were alone together in the women’s rest room. But Mrs. House adjusted Sonja’s veil in silence. She might have talked to Sonja moments after Sonja became Henry’s wife, when they all gathered in the basement of the church for the reception. Instead, Mrs. House waited until the wedding party and guests had driven in a caravan to Sturgeon Bay, to the Knights of Columbus Hall, where the wedding dance was to take place. She waited until everyone had eaten and drunk their fill, until they had all stepped and twirled around the hot second-story dance floor with such intensity that coats were tossed aside, ties loosened, buttons unbuttoned, until sweat glistened on the flushed cheeks of both women and men. Mrs. House waited until she herself was drunk. . . .
    Sonja sat alone in a row of folding chairs near an open window, where she had gone with the