He said, "You're wonderin' if I'd of killed you."

"I don't really care."

"What do you mean, you don't care? Of course you care. You got kids. You got family." He smiled. "You got me." He patted her hand across the table. "Hey, I knew you wasn't gonna kill me. You know why? 'Cause you love me."

Annie took a breath and fought down a scream. He tapped his fork on her nose and continued, "You see, you're still jealous. Now, that means you still love me. Right?"

Annie was emotionally drained, exhausted, and her shoulder throbbed. She had nothing left in her except the presence of mind to say what he wanted to hear. She said, "Yes."

He smiled. "But you hate me, too. Now, I'm gonna tell you something — there's a thin line between love and hate."

She nodded, as though this were some new revelation to her. Cliff was always mouthing idiotic cliches and aphorisms, as if he'd just made them up, and it never occurred to him that these were not original insights into the human mind.

"Remember that next time you're pissed off at me." She smiled, and he realized he'd used a bad choice of words. She said, "I'm going to the cleaners this morning. Do you have anything to go?"

He leaned toward her and said, "You watch yourself."

"Yes, sir."

"And cut the sir shit."

"Sorry."

He mopped up his yolks with his toast and said, "You call old Willie to fix up the ceiling."

"Yes."

He sat back and looked at her. "You know, I break my ass to give you things most people in this town ain't got. Now, what do you want me to do? Retire, hang around the house, pinch pennies, and help you with the chores all day?"

"No."

"I'm bustin' my hump, doin' a job for this town, and you think I'm out there floggin' my Johnson all over the county."

She nodded in the appropriate places during the familiar lecture, and shook her head when it was called for.

Cliff stood, strapped on his pistol belt, and came around the table. He hugged her around the shoulders, and she winced in pain. He kissed her on the head and said, "We're gonna forget this. You tidy up a little more here and call Willie. I'll be home about six. I feel like steak tonight. Check the beer in the fridge. Feed the dogs." He added, "Wash my uniform."

He went to the back door, and, on his way out, said, "And don't you ever call me at work again unless somebody's dyin'." He left.

Annie stared across the kitchen at nothing in particular. Maybe, she thought, if she had let him get his gun out of his holster, she would have blown his head off. But maybe not, and maybe he would have shot her, which was okay, too. Maybe they'd hang him.

The only thing she knew for certain was that Cliff forgot nothing and forgave nothing. She'd literally scared the pee out of him, and there'd be hell to pay. Not that she'd notice much difference.

She stood and was surprised to find her legs were weak and there was a queasy feeling in her stomach. She went to the sink and opened the window. The sun was coming up, and a few storm clouds sailed away toward the east. Birds sang in the yard, and the hungry dogs were trying to get her attention with short, polite barks.

Life, she thought, could be lovely. No, she said to herself, life was lovely. Life was beautiful. Cliff Baxter couldn't make the sun stop rising or the birds stop singing, and he did not, could not, control her mind or her spirit. She hated him for dragging her down to his level, for making her contemplate murder or suicide.

She thought again of Keith Landry. In her mind, Cliff Baxter was always the black knight, and Keith Landry was the white knight. This image worked as long as Keith was a disembodied ideal. Her worst nightmare would be to discover that Keith Landry in person was not the Keith Landry she'd created out of short and infrequent letters and long-ago memories.

The returned letter, as well as the dream about Cliff, had been the catalyst for what just happened, she realized. She'd snapped. But now she felt better, and she promised herself that if Keith was alive, she'd find the means and the courage to see him, to speak to him, to see how much of him was her fantasy and how much of him was real.

Chapter Five

The drone of some sort of machinery began to register in Keith Landry's mind, and he opened his eyes. A breeze billowed the white lace curtains, and sunlight seeped into the gray dawn.

He could smell the rain-washed soil, the country air, a field of alfalfa somewhere. He lay awhile, his eyes darting around the room, his mind focusing. He'd had this recurring dream of waking up in his old room so often that actually waking up in his old room was eerie.

He sat up, stretched, and yawned. "Day four, life two, morning. Roll 'em." He jumped out of bed and made his way toward the bathroom down the hall.

Showered and dressed in khaki slacks and T-shirt, he examined the contents of the refrigerator. Whole milk, white bread, butter, bacon, and eggs. He hadn't eaten any of those things in years, but said, "Why not?" He made himself a big, artery-clogging breakfast. It tasted terrific. It tasted like home.

He walked out the back door and stood in the gravel drive. The air was cool and damp, and a ground mist lay over the fields. He walked around the farmyard. The barn was in bad repair, he saw, and, as he explored what had once been a substantial farm, he noticed the debris of a past way of life: a rusted ax buried in a chopping block, the collapsed corncrib, the tilting silo, the ruined springhouse and chicken coop, the broken fences of the paddock and pigpen, the equipment shed filled with old hand tools — these all remained, unrecycled, uncollected, unwanted, contributing to the rural blight.

The kitchen garden and grape arbor, he noticed, were overgrown with vines and weeds, and he saw now that the house itself needed painting.

The nostalgia he'd been experiencing on the way here was at odds with the reality before him. The family farms of his boyhood were not so picturesque now, and the families who once worked them were, he knew from past visits, becoming fewer.

The young people went to the cities to find work, as his brother and sister had done, and the older people increasingly went south to escape the harsh winters, as his parents had done. Much of the surrounding land had been sold or contracted to big agribusinesses, and the remaining family holdings were as hard-pressed today as they had been when he was growing up. The difference now was not in the economics; it was in the will of the farmer to hang in there despite the bad odds. On the ride here, he'd thought about trying to farm, but now that he was here, he had second thoughts.

He found himself in the front of the farmhouse, and he focused on the front porch, remembering summer nights, rocking chairs and porch swings, lemonade, radios, family, and friends. He had a sudden urge to call his parents and his brother and sister and tell them he was home and suggest a reunion on the farm. But he thought he ought to wait until he got himself mentally settled, until he understood his mood and his motivations more clearly.

Keith got into his car and drove out onto the dusty farm road.

The four hundred acres of the Landry farm had been contracted out to the Muller family down the road, and his parents received a check every spring. Most of the Landry acres were in corn, according to his father, but the Muller family had put a hundred acres into soybean production to supply a nearby processing plant built by a Japanese company. The plant employed a good number of people, Keith knew, and bought a lot of soybeans. Nevertheless, xenophobia ran high and hot in Spencer County, and Keith was certain that the Japanese were as unwelcome as the Mexican migrants who showed up every summer. It was odd, Keith thought, perhaps portentous, that this rural county, deep in the heartland, had been discovered by Japanese, Mexicans, and more recently by people from India and Pakistan, many of whom were physicians at the county hospital.