"I won't be able to go back to sleep now," she says.

"Well, go lie down, then," I say. Behind us something clunks and thumps at the barricade and Einstein is in the living room.

I start after the goat, who takes off down the hall, and Martine and I finally corner him in the bathroom.

"That furniture isn't going to stop him," Martine says. Einstein is a shaggy white goat, the kind that look like someone threw a stringy carpet over them.

"Any ideas?" I ask.

Martine thinks a moment and then closes the bathroom door. "Let him stew," she says, "there's nothing he can hurt in there."

His hooves clatter on the bathroom tile. It's dark in there. I hear a muted bleat. I don't think I've ever heard Einstein sound nervous. Maybe he'll have a nervous breakdown and never be right again. It's not that I don't like Einstein, exactly, it's just that he's always been a pain. As Martine says, he's smart.

"Did you lock Einstein in the bathroom?" Theresa calls from her bedroom.

"Yes," I answer, "do you need to go?"

"No," she says, to my relief.

"Go to sleep, Theresa."

I help Martine climb over the barricade, and shove the table more solidly against it. We wade through goat and perch side by side on the counter.

"Do you want a shirt?" Martine asks.

"Not bad enough to go get one," I answer. "You've seen me without a shirt before."

Martine touches her hair self-consciously, barely brushing it with her fingertips, then smooths it firmly.

"It looks all right," I say.

Startled, she drops her hand in her lap. Martine takes personal compliments badly. "Cleo!" she snaps at a goat pushing at the barricade. Cleo doesn't stop and Martine sighes but doesn't go after her.

Oh, I'm tired. And things are a mess. "We're almost out of indicator packs, aren't we?" I ask.

"I imagine," Martine says. "In the morning I'll pick some up, and tell Equipment that our system is down. Can you fix it?"

"No," I say.

"I didn't think so," Martine says and sighes again.

"What are we going to do?" I ask.

"Can you keep the air mixture good manually?"

I shrug. "After a fashion. I guess if I had to I could make some sort of automatic regulator. I don't know if I could do the house, the garden and both goat yards."

"Then we'll close off the new yard and sell some of the goats," Martine says. "We'll see if we can run one yard on manual, at least until we get a new system."

"It might have to wait until the next window," I say. The next window is over a year away.

"We could get one on the free market in New Arizona," she says.

"We don't have the credit," I say.

"We can borrow."

I don't say anything.

After a moment she takes my hand. "Alexi," she says, "this isn't the end of everything, we're not going to lose the place. We may have to give up beer and lemonade and sell strawberries and green beans for awhile."

"It's a lot of money," I say.

Irritated, she says, "You are the most paranoid man imaginable. You think this is debt, you wouldn't believe what I did to get this place started."

"Things don't always go right," I point out.

"And they don't always go wrong, either. And stop talking so quietly. You know, whenever you're upset about something it's as if you had to iron all the expression out of your voice."

"That's better than screaming and raving, isn't it?" I say. I do sound curiously flat, even to my ears. I don't feel flat.

"All right, Alexi," she agrees. Disappointment in her voice, in her body language. We're still holding hands, but I'm sure she doesn't realize it.

"I didn't ask you to marry me," I say, defending myself.

"Son of a bitch," she says, not particularly at me, it has the sound of a general expletive. I'm taken aback, Martine doesn't swear much.

"I should have known. Okay. You want a divorce, we'll divorce."

There it is, proof of how badly I've failed her, failed this whole thing. "I don't want a divorce," I say, "but I'm willing to do whatever you want." I never saw myself sitting on the counter in the kitchen, our feet disappearing into a sea of goats, holding Martine's hand while we discussed divorce. Cleo shoves at the barricade. "Damn it," I leap off the counter and haul the nanny away, shove Theresa-the-goat down. When I turn around, Martine is watching me, and she looks so sad, so, what is the word I am looking for? So devastated. Martine has great huge dark eyes, funny how I never thought of how big her eyes are until this moment, in her pale long face.

"Alexi," she says, forlornly, and to my great consternation she starts to cry.

You have to understand, Martine doesn't cry. At least not in my experience. Martine is iron. She's Army. Discipline. For a moment I don't have any idea what to do. So I wade back through goats and climb up onto the counter and put my arms around her.

"It's all right," I say, and other, soothing things, things you say when someone is crying.

"I know I'm old," she says, sniffling. "I know it wasn't fair, using the holding as a bribe. I thought, though, it would work out." Martine's strong, rather prominent nose gets red, and she looks older when she cries. Certainly not prettier.

"You're not old," I say.

"I'm forty-four," she says, "I'm ten years older than you-"

"Eight," I correct.

"Men like younger women."

"I never felt worthy of you," I say, deeply, from the bottom of my heart.

That makes her cry harder. "I don't want you to feel worthy," she says, "I want you to like me!" She pulls away and gets down among the sea of goats and shoves Lilith out of the way so she can open a drawer and pull out a dish towel.

"I do like you," I say, perplexed. "I like you, I even love you."

"But you're always worrying about pulling your own weight," she says. "You're always going to feel like this was my farm first, so you owe me. Everything is debt, debt, debt. You owe Theresa because her mother died. You owe me because of the holding. You owe the commune because of the new yard so you take this class and try to figure out how to make it useful. Nobody gives a damn if you ever use this class or not, it's politics Alexi. It looks good on the report to New Arizona!"

I don't know what to say. After a minute I say, "You make it sound as if it's a crime to be grateful."

"It's not being grateful," she says. "The flip side of grateful is resentment. You're not my slave, I don't want you to be my slave."

"Hold it," I say. Goats bleat. We are getting loud and Theresa is going to hear this. I grab her arm, "Come on," and haul her out into the garden. "You've exaggerated this all out of proportion. I'm not your slave, I don't feel like your slave, maybe I do worry about keeping up my end. But I never know what you think! You never tell me if you like the way things are or you don't like the way things are. I don't know how you feel about me. I don't know if you like being my wife. Hell, I don't even know if you like sex with me!"

"You don't have to talk so loud," Martine says.

"A minute ago you were complaining I didn't talk loud enough!"

Martine starts to laugh. It runs through my mind that she's hysterical, after all it's between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning.

"What's wrong?" I say.

"It's funny," she says, laughing.

"What?"

"Here we are with a kitchen full of goats, having our first married argument."

"Is this our first argument?" I ask, trying to remember previous arguments.

"Our first real one," she says.

"We argue about Theresa, you're always telling me not to remind her to feed the goats."

"That's not an argument. I say it, you say she's eight-years-old and then we don't say anymore." She grins at me, red nosed from crying.

"If this is our first argument," I say thoughtfully-