Winnie had always taken his side in this, and of course he had always taken Winnie's side too, her role of chaste inaction and apartness. No surprise; it was she and Pierce alone, and then the rest of them all together. That she was only a sort of half mother to her brother Sam's kids, unwilling to take power fully among them, might account for the ironized way she would make gestures toward raising them, offering antique rules of behavior or morality in a voice that withdrew them at the same moment: Children never let your angry passions rise / Those little nails were never meant to tear each other's eyes. You didn't know whether she was siding with you or taking you to task. She had had no official power to act there or anywhere, and couldn't teach her son how to take that power either, or to accept it for himself, there or anywhere; she only taught him the wry jokes to make—the kind she made, apparently at herself and her ineffectuality but really at all who had been fooled into acting in the world. She applauded all his meager accomplishments, without questioning why they were so meager; when periodically he returned from that world of strife and action to her room upstairs beside her brother's, having failed in one attempt or another—predictably, comically, lovably, failed again—she'd say Oh well, resigning all other possibilities, at once sad and gay. Oh well.

That appeared to be a tallish blondish woman slamming with a great heave-to the door of a huge sedan in the dealership's parking lot. If he had a pair of binoculars he might be able to resolve the figure. Did she have a little dog on a leash? Why would that be? He bent forward, as though to bring himself a little closer to the scene, and at that moment felt a touch on his back, so that he leapt, startled.

"Hey,” said Roo. “How you doing?"

"Um. Good. Quite well. You guv me a start, as they say down where I come from."

She sat beside him, hands in the pockets of a sheepskin coat. “Yeah? Where's that?"

"Kentucky."

"You don't sound like a southerner. Or a hillbilly."

"Good. Are you not working today?"

She shrugged. “You?"

"Well, you know. I loaf for a living,” Pierce said.

She laughed. Her teeth were astonishingly crooked, a great gap in the middle, and others crowding the row like spectators at a streefight. They sat there in the last of the spring sun for a time, and talked on general topics, each ready at any moment to back away if an impasse was reached and politely take leave. But that didn't quite happen, and evening came, and they still sat. She learned that Pierce had taught college once upon a time, and did no more; that he'd set out to write a book, and had given it up; that he was in a dispute with his former landlord about a lease and that his belongings languished in the old place; that he was living at the Morpheus Arms on a grant from the Rasmussen Foundation that he hadn't quite earned, and was without a further plan. She passed no judgment on this career, even while making it plain that it seemed to her a waste of some uncommon resources.

"So? You've kicked around,” he retorted. “Never anything long. Right?"

"I worked as a lineman for a whole year,” she said. “In Idaho. I'll never forget the procedures. I could recite them now."

"You mean a telephone person? Shimmying up those poles?"

"Well, a cherry picker, actually, mostly. But yes. The hard hat. The tool belt. You know."

"So did that alter your social life? Being a hard hat?"

"Well. You know there's men—I don't think a big number—that have a thing about a woman in a tool belt. Don't ask me why."

"Really."

"When I say, ‘Don't ask me why,’ that doesn't mean I've got no idea."

"Aha. Yes.” He could see her, in fact, and didn't need an explanation: her narrow wide-set hips in creased jeans, brown arms, wristwatch, the heavy belt.

When it was too dark and too cold to sit at the table, they rose together, and almost as though they'd had a date to do so, they went (in the little chartreuse Bobcat she was driving that day) to the Sandbox, a cousin establishment to the Morpheus Arms, where she chose a dark corner far from the bar and the pool table. A hangout for the guys from the dealership just down the road, it appeared, and maybe others she might not want to run into, but still the place she chose to be; where Pierce (this was what he remembered on entering the dim sweet-sour-smelling place) had heard or seen Rose Ryder speak in tongues as a country western band played and brayed. Or he'd thought she had. It seemed certain to him now that she had not, which made less difference than he felt it ought to.

"I fell in with bad magicians,” he told Roo, when she wanted to know the story.

"Oh really."

"They claimed to have power over death. That if you believed in them you wouldn't die. You might look dead and rot in the grave but somehow you'd get up again alive and well when the time came."

"In Heaven."

"No. Not somewhere else. Here. Right here. In the Faraways, say; only the Faraways made better just for you. And then never die again."

"Sounds good."

"It was terrifying."

She studied him. “Are you afraid of death?"

"I don't know that I am. I mean it doesn't frighten me to think about it. Or name it anyway."

"But these people frightened you by talking about it."

"Yes.” He felt the dread or danger again; it was a beast that accompanied him, rousing now and then at a soul-noise it heard. And as it roused he knew also and certainly what he had not known before this iteration—that he would not ever understand the reasons for it, his dread, not if he lived to a hundred, and that in this unknowing lay the way he would at last be done with it: he would forget it, as the worst dream is forgotten, the awful force of its logic in dreamland finally canceled by its illogic in this land. Only the story of it left. “And you?” he said. “Are you?"

"I'm sort of afraid. More like tense, sometimes. It seems like it'll be a kind of test—you know, a big final. Everything points to it. You want to get it right."

"How would you do that?"

"Probably not a lot you can do then. At that moment. Especially if you like get hit by a truck. It would be the things you'd done all along."

"Like a final grade."

"But one you give yourself. I mean nobody's taking attendance. I don't think."

"And then?” Pierce asked.

"Then?"

"Afterward."

She turned her bottle's end against the napkin on which it rested, which caused the paper to fold neatly around the bottle in a rose shape: it was a habit he himself had. “Here's what I think. Well, think's too much to say. I feel like if there is some part of you—of me—that goes on after, then it has to somehow in life get up enough velocity to get off, right then. At that moment. To get away."

"Escape velocity,” Pierce said.

"And you get that by what you do in life. You build it up.” She drank. “That's all."

* * * *

Later she brought him back to the motel and stayed at the wheel, motor running, while he got out, which seemed to be a clear enough signal, but just as he gestured goodbye—So hey, okay—she offered to borrow a truck to carry away from the house in Littleville his belongings. Next day or whenever. He accepted. The larger furniture he thought could take its chances with the Winterhalters for a while; he wanted only to take away the life he had led, in case they grew vindictive, held it all hostage, put new locks on the doors, forbade it to him. When she called on the appointed day to get directions, he asked her please not to actually come into the house if that was okay; he made sure to drive over first, and when the little panel truck appeared, rolling like a bear down the rutted driveway, he had already put into boxes and bags all the books, the papers, the clothes and household goods, unavailing regrets, mysteries, bonds, tools, greatcoats, galoshes, grammarye, medicines, shames, hooks and eyes. It had all shrunk or shriveled into a list of nouns, inanimate, abstract, but he was still knee-deep in it. So much, so much.