Dale blinked. He had told his daughters as well as his colleagues and business associates that he would pick up his mail care of General Delivery in Elm Haven. He had never thought to do so.

“Sorry, kiddo,” said Dale. “I’ve been. . . busy.” He heard how silly that phrase sounded. “What’s up, Mab? Are you calling from Clermont?”

“No, Daddy. I’m home for Christmas vacation. We needed to know if you were coming. . . back this way.” Dale heard the unheard word— home.

“Christmas vacation?” he said, confused again. “It’s weeks until your Christmas vacation, Mab. Why are you home early?”

There was a silence broken only by the idling of the Land Cruiser and the hiss of static and distance over the frozen fields. Then Mab said, “Dad. . . it’s not early. Today’s December twenty-second.”

Dale laughed. “No it’s not, kiddo. Thanksgiving was just a few days ago. . .” He paused, not wanting to tell his daughter that he had spent the holiday with a woman they had never heard about. “Seriously, why are you home early?”

“Daddy,” real frustration audible now. “It is December twenty-second. Tomorrow is the day before Christmas Eve. Now stop it. You’re scaring me.”

“Sorry, kiddo.” It was all that Dale could think of to say. He looked at his watch, switching on the overhead light in the truck to check the date. The watch had stopped at 4:15. The date said the 8th, although he had no idea what month.

Another voice spoke. His younger daughter, Katie, her voice still cooler but deeper than Mab’s. “Dad?” Katie had never called him Daddy.

“Hey, Butch,” said Dale, using his old joke name for her. He tried to keep his voice light. “How’s everything?”

“Where are you?” asked Katie.

Dale looked around at the dark fields, but he could see only his own reflection in the windows and windshield. “I’m here where I said I’d be. I’m sorry I haven’t called or checked the mail. I just. . . got busy. I’m writing a novel. An important novel. I sort of. . . lost track of everything, I guess.”

The cell phone’s low battery indicator blinked once. Dale cursed softly to himself. He did not want to lose the call now.

“Daddy,” said Mab, “are you coming home for Christmas?”

Dale felt as if someone had cut through his ribs and squeezed his heart once, very tightly. He took a breath. “I hadn’t thought about it, kiddo. The ranch. . .” He stopped. The girls didn’t want to hear about the ranch or its renters. He tried again. “Your mother. . .” he began and stopped.

“Mom didn’t know if you’d be back in Missoula for Christmas,” said Katie. It seemed to be a question.

“I don’t think that she’d think that it was a good idea,” Dale said at last.

The low battery indicator glowed steadily.

“Daddy,” said Mab at last, “Mom’s just run out to the drugstore for something, but she should be home in a minute or two. If she called you. . . if she called your cell phone number in just a couple of minutes. . . would you talk to her about you coming home while we’re all here for Christmas?”

Dale could not speak. His mind seemed as wind-blown and empty as the fields beyond the reflections on the glass.

“Good,” said Mab as if he had agreed. “Stay where you are. Mom’ll call back in the next two minutes.”

The line went dead. Dale clicked off the phone, left its power on, and set it on the console between the two front seats. It was beginning to snow, flakes visible in the twin cones of the headlights. No other vehicles had passed him.

Dale sat there for ten minutes—his watch was still stopped, but the green letters of the dashboard clock read 9:52. He stared at his cell phone. The Low Battery glowed, but the power was still on.

The phone rang. Dale jumped as if a rattlesnake had made a noise inches from his hand. He grabbed the phone.

“Hello?” His heart was pounding, and he heard the shakiness in his voice.

“Dale? Dale, it’s Michelle.”

“Who?” Dale said stupidly.

“Michelle. Michelle Staffney. Dale, I’ve got a problem.” Her voice was also trembling.

For a minute, Dale could not shift mental gears. It was as if Michelle Staffney had been only a dream and now he was beginning to doze again. She had never called him on his cell phone before. He could not remember giving her his cell phone number.

“Michelle?” he said thickly.

“I’m at the school grounds, Dale. In Elm Haven. On the playground where Old Central School used to be. . .”

Dale waited, wondering if he should hang up. The low battery indicator was very bright.

“. . . and the dogs are here, Dale. They’re all around me.”

“What?” said Dale.

“The black dogs. The ones from Duane’s farm. They’re here. . . in town. They’re all around me.”

The phone went dead.

SEVENTEEN

AT this point I begin to worry about Dale. The missed phone call from his wife, Anne—if, indeed, Anne had called back at all—seems the kind of turning point that too often converts light farce to tragedy.

Obviously I know nothing about women. I grew up with just the Old Man and Uncle Art around and paid almost zero attention to the girls at Old Central School. I remember Michelle Staffney as the fifth- and sixth-grade redheaded sex grenade, but since “sex” didn’t really mean much to kids back in that prehistoric era circa 1960, none of the boys in the Bike Patrol really paid much attention to her other than to act like idiots whenever she was around.

Through Dale, I have memories of sexual intercourse—with girls he knew in high school and college, with Anne, even with the self-appointed Beatrice of his idolatry, this aptly named Clare Two Hearts—but memory of lust, much like memory of pain, is a surprisingly unspecific, clouded thing, and I can’t say I feel that I missed too much of that particular aspect of not having lived to adulthood. I confess that I regret more never having seen King Lear performed than never having had a sexual encounter.

But I don’t think that Dale rushed into Elm Haven this December night on some lustful errand; he had found some respite from solitude in talking with Mica Stouffer née Michelle Staffney, but at this point he certainly did not desire her other than in the most passing way. His affair—his romantic interlude—with the person called Clare had driven him quite far from desire’s dark shores. Of course, so had the clinical depression that had rendered him impotent for months and the heavy dosage of Prozac and other drugs that followed. One might say that Dale Stewart’s libido had taken a direct hit from a pharmaceutical heat-seeking missile.

If I had lived and become a writer, I might have tried to explain the role that eros plays in the lives and misfortunes of men, but I suspect that it would have been in a classical and twice-removed fashion. When I lived outside of Elm Haven, reading away my less-than-dozen winters and summers and equinox months, my ideal of the perfect woman was the Wife of Bath. I suspect that if I had grown up, moved on, sought, and found such a woman—identifiable, I always assumed, by that delightful, sensual gap between her front teeth—I would have, in the end, fled from the vitalism of such a sexual life force. More to the point, what would she have wanted with me—the sedentary lump, the solipsistic, overweight, clumsy, and poorly dressed geek?

But then again, Arthur Miller ended up with Marilyn Monroe, however briefly.

Of more interest to me now than Dale’s imperfect memories of past lovemaking were the images and recollections of his two daughters. Perhaps it is only with one’s mother and girl children that a male human being can really hold any hope of knowing and understanding women.

Margaret Beth—Mab—his oldest girl, was always the apple of his eye. Remembering her through his remembering, I cannot help but think of literary equivalents I had encountered—Aaron Burr with his beloved daughter, Sir Thomas More with his. These intellectual equals were the real women in these famous men’s lives, and there was some of that with Mab and Dale. . . at least until this Clare appeared on the scene.