Her stomach began to feel better, but the feeling of lassitude did not depart-it seemed to have settled in her bones-and when her period did not come, Mary knew what had happened. The directions on the package said that she should wait until morning to take the test, that the concentration of hormones in her urine would be highest at first waking. But the hours that she kept, working late at the bar and seeing just a few hours of sunlight each day, made this seem like advice for some other woman. She took the test alone in the apartment at two in the afternoon, neither expecting nor receiving a different result than the one she got, then dressed and went to work at the Norway.

She wondered what she would do. She could not say that she loved Curtis, but even if she had, this love would be nothing to trust. In any event, she could not see Curtis as a father. She was afraid, but also felt, strangely, that this fear would guide her, that it would help her choose. In college she had known girls to whom the same thing had happened, and the ones who paid the highest price were those who seemed not to care. They went away for a day or two, an interruption no greater than a trip to the dentist to have wisdom teeth removed-many, in fact, claimed this very alibi-then returned to their lives as if nothing had happened; but a month or so later, just when the crisis seemed over, they would find themselves barricaded in their dorm rooms, unable to sleep or eat or even dress, weeping uncontrollably or else feeling nothing at all. Mary would see one of the resident advisors knocking quietly on the door, and then asking questions-is everything all right with so-and-so?-and the next thing anyone knew, the room would be empty, the mattress turned over and propped against the wall, and that would be the end of it.

On the day after the test Mary awoke in an empty bed, and knew that the worst of the sickness had passed. Curtis had taken the Citation to Minneapolis to show some of his paintings to a dealer who bought artwork for model homes in housing developments, and Mary spent the afternoon cleaning the apartment before visiting Russell at the bakery. The air of the bakery was moist and sweet, and under the long banks of fluorescent lights Russell was moving trays of bread dough, molded into loaves, in and out of the oven. Mary watched him, still in her heavy coat.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“What does anyone do?”

They took pint cartons of milk from the refrigerator and sat at a stainless-steel table in the back, eating heart-shaped Valentine cookies sprinkled with purple sugar that stuck to their fingers.

“I can speak to Curtis.” Russell took a long drink of milk to wash down a cookie and brushed crumbs from his red beard. “The word I’m thinking of is ‘responsibilities.’”

Mary found this hard to envision. “You two don’t even like each other,” she said.

Russell thought about this and tossed his empty carton in a trash pail full of tiny snippets of dough. “That could work in my favor.” He paused and looked at Mary. “Either way, you know, you should probably be talking to him.”

Russell was waiting to hear from graduate schools, and they discussed his prospects. His first choice was the University of Iowa, but Laurie opposed this plan, having had enough of Iowa.

“The thing is,” Russell said, shaking his head, “I can’t even really explain why I want to get a Ph.D. anymore. What’s so important about Elizabethan courtesy manuals? Why do I love the things that no one cares about?”

“That’s always the question,” Mary agreed.

Russell’s grandfather was also a baker, in a small town in the Iron Range. “I once asked him, ‘How did you know-really know-that you wanted to do this with your life?’”

“What did he say?”

Russell climbed off his stool and wiped his hands on his apron. “‘The old baker died.’”

Twig was famous for very little, but in 1874, in the dead of winter, the Jesse James gang had held up the town bank. Unlike his well-known defeat at the town of Northfield in the summer of 1876, the James gang had strolled into Twig Savings and Loan and made off with the money easily, plunging the town into a financial abyss that had nearly erased it from the map of time. It was an odd event to celebrate, but every year on the anniversary of the robbery the Lions Club staged a reenactment on Main Street, and in the evening there were fireworks over the baseball diamond.

That night Mary and Russell went to the fireworks together, and when the last ashes had scattered over the snowy baseball field, Mary left him to begin her shift at the Norway. She finished at midnight and sat down with Phil, who was wearing a lopsided cowboy hat, as he always did for “Jesse Fest.” It was one of Phil’s greatest disappointments that the Lions Club had never asked him to play the role of the great bandit himself. On the bartop in front of him was a single bullet, and he picked it up and pointed it at Mary, who raised her arms in mock alarm.

“Don’t shoot, Jesse,” Mary said.

Phil returned the bullet to the bartop and thoughtfully smoothed out his moustache with thumb and forefinger. “It’s the wrong caliber, anyway. Have a look at this.” He searched his shirt pockets and produced a photocopied wanted poster of Jesse James, which he held beside his face.

“Now, what am I seeing?”

“I got it at the library,” Phil explained. “When I saw it, I, too, was surprised at the degree of likeness.”

Mary studied the picture another moment. “There’s always next year,” she said.

“Not the way I hear it.” Phil dejectedly folded the poster back up. “You think they haven’t seen this already? I am persona non grata in this town.”

Mary got Phil his last beer and got one for herself.

“You shouldn’t drink,” Phil said to her.

Mary poured her beer down the sink and got a Coke instead. “God. Who told you?”

“You shouldn’t, you know. Or smoke.” Phil lit one himself and crumpled the empty pack.

Mary sat down beside him again and waved the thick air away. “It’s the same, just being in here. I’m serious. Did you talk to Russell?”

Phil frowned. “Who’s Russell?”

“So you didn’t talk to him.”

“I always wanted a son.” Phil sighed, his eyes pooling with tears. “Now it’s too late.”

Mary pointed at his beer. “I’ve lost track. How many is that?”

“It’s all right,” Phil said, and rose stiffly to go. “I’m done for tonight.”

She helped him with his coat, a denim jacket so filthy it seemed weighed down by dirt. He had the cowboy hat but no scarf, and she took her own and wrapped it around his lanky neck, tucking the ends into the jacket. “Straight home, all right? It’s cold. Call when you get there.”

Mary left the bar and returned under a full moon to the apartment over the shoe store. Curtis was working at his easel in her old bedroom, and Russell was asleep. She couldn’t explain how Phil had known-although, in hindsight, she recognized that this might not have been so; his words were ambiguous. Mary made cocoa for herself and Curtis and told him her news.

Curtis sat beside her on the sofa and put his arms around her. “A baby,” he said happily; and yet he did not look at her as he said this. “How did it happen?”

“I think in the usual way,” Mary said.

“We were careful, were we not?”

“There’s careful and there’s careful,” Mary said.

They agreed that they would wait a week to see how they felt. That night, in bed with Curtis, Mary thought about Phil. He hadn’t called, but she had not really expected him to. She saw him walking home through moonlight to the run-down house he shared with his cats, across a field of snow as blue as radioactive milk. She saw him lying down in the snow, and then the wind began to push snow over his body, until only the tips of his shoes were showing, but they were her mother’s shoes, and it was her mother under the snow. Then she woke up and realized she had dreamt this.