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but it’s of a middle-aged couple in front of a house, and they don’t look particularly happy. Does he have nothing plain and simple? He pulls out a thin sheet of blue airmail stationery, looks at his watch. Five past four. What’s open?
    He puts on the hooded sweatshirt, checks his back pocket to make sure he has his wallet. He slides his keys from the kitchen counter, snaps the screen door shut. Harriet is raking along the ell, already removing the first leaves of the season. She has her back to him. He watches as she bends and pulls. She has on jeans, an aqua sweater. The tines of the rake scrape along the dirt, obscure the sound of his leaving. She doesn’t turn around. He hesitates, observing her.
    He loves her more than he used to, he does know that. He does not like to think about the early years of their marriage, when he would sometimes wake in the night, his heart racing, stricken with the knowledge that he and she had both made a terrible mistake. That fear, foundering and bobbing in the early mornings like a stick tossed upon a chop, would make him irritable, and they often fought. He remembers the fights—shrill words he thought could never be taken back. But then Harriet had become pregnant with Hadley, and their life together—the pregnancies, the babies, the house, the building of his business—had become a project that made them quieter, easier together, and he no longer allowed himself to ponder the question of whether or not he had made a mistake. How could he regret the decisions he had made that led to Hadley and to Jack and to Anna? It was to him almost a physical impossibility, like juggling, which he has attempted several times to impress his children but has never mastered.
    He watches her stoop to remove a rock. Her jeans are tight along the backs of her thighs. Since Anna she has not lost the extra ten pounds she has wanted to lose, despite her vigorous and sometimes comical early morning walks with the hand weights. He has tried to tell her that she looks fine as she is, which is true but does not explain why they seldom make love anymore. He does not understand it himself exactly, except that it is harder now to get through the day without the small irritations that lead to resignation.
    He knows, too, that it is not Harriet who often demurs in the bedroom at night, but rather himself. Always, his wife asked for and accepted their sexual life as a given—even in those early years, when there was little love between them. For that he might be grateful, though he often feels that while she is essentially present in the bed, perhaps even in the entire marriage itself, he somehow is not.
    The fan rake catches on a rock, bends the tine. He thinks of calling to her, taking the rake, straightening the tine for her, but he stops himself, watches instead as she ignores the rake’s bent finger and drags the tool even more aggressively across the ground.
    They are not alike, he and Harriet, a fact that he knows was a source of his tension in the early years of their marriage. A tension that has become a mild discomfort whenever he has to be alone with her. They do not talk much together, and he knows that despite the children and the house, they have little in common. It is not just the obvious dissimilarities—that he is an Irish Catholic and she a Yankee Congregationalist, despite the fact they virtually never attend church (nor do the children); or that he grew up in working-class Providence while she spent her childhood in the suburbs; or even that he cannot quite escape the old thought patterns of sin and redemption, while she seems never to have imagined a life in terms of transgressions and payments. No, it is instead, he thinks, the smaller truths, the almost inconsequential ones, that carry with them the greater weight: That she has plans for any given day and seldom deviates from them, is almost never late, and at the end of the day can add up the