Chapter 2

Clay came to bed at twelve forty. He showered first, and hung the towel straight, and set his keys on the nightstand the way he does, all forty of them on that ring, house and shop and trucks and cellar, and he was asleep in six minutes because he has never in his life had trouble sleeping.

I lay there and listened to the furnace.

At one twenty I got up.

It was still raining. Freezing rain, the kind that gets in the collar and stays. I pulled my coveralls on over the long johns and went out the mudroom door and across the yard with the yard light flickering, and I passed the scale house, and through its window I could see the little red light on the answering machine blinking in the dark like something with a heartbeat.

Rufus met me at the run gate, and he let me in, and he stood between me and the house the whole time.

The doghouse sits on a skirt of scrap plywood I put down four years ago so the mud wouldn't eat the floor out from under it. The board on the west side had been worked loose and set back. Loose enough to lift with one finger.

I knelt down in the slush and put my hand in.

Plastic grocery bag. Then another. My fingers found a handle, and I dragged the whole thing out into the light - a milk crate off my own shelf, the one I keep rags in, the one I'd been telling myself I must have moved.

I sat down on the wet gravel and opened it.

On top, folded, three white undershirts. Each one in its own separate bag, each one knotted shut like it mattered. Stiff, and greyish at the left shoulder.

Under the shirts, a leather belt, folded in thirds, with one crease worn deep and shining in the middle, like a hinge.

A length of black heater hose, doubled and taped so it would stay doubled.

A wooden yardstick with the top six inches snapped off, and the break hadn't been cut, it had been bent until it gave.

A brass padlock.

And my knit cap. Black, wool, that I lost in November the night I tripped on the shop stairs going up to the parts loft, the night I came down on my hip on the landing and Clay said I needed to watch my footing.

I sat there with my cap in my hands and freezing rain running off my nose and Rufus's breath steaming next to me.

Then I did the thing I'm not proud of, which is that I walked over to the cellar doors and looked.

The hasp was open. The padlock had been gone so long I'd quit noticing it. I'd asked Clay about it once, back in the spring, and he'd said he'd misplaced the key and would cut it off, and I'd said fine, because the mower in there wasn't worth a lock and the tools inside weren't either.

I had the padlock in my pocket.

I went back in the house at two in the morning and lay down next to my husband with my wet coveralls still on the porch floor and my cap stuffed down in my coat pocket, and I listened to him breathe for three hours with my eyes open, and that was the first thing I ever did that he didn't know about.