We finished what was on our plates. Now the creek was about six feet below the bank. A boy of nine or ten, the boy whose bicycle was missing, Hamilton supposed, sat next to the woman. Bill took a deep breath as he entered the Stones' apartment. I haven't been. Perhaps I wanted to avoid a frontal attack. He knows it's tough shit. "Kiss me," she said. "Going on a year and a half," Laura said, flushed and smiling. Throughout this story Carver experiments with the use of quotation and meditates on the healing factors of storytelling. And I don't, I guess. Then the hands and hair catching in the overhanging branches, holding, until four men come along to stare at her. "Likewise," I said. He glanced at the gray sky, filled with flakes, and at the tall buildings with snow in the crevices and on the window ledges. It was a dreadful, harrowing sound, and the young man lowered his chin into his collar and turned away as the ratchety breathing worsened. It was summer, after all, and before long summer would be over. I feel like hell, I really do, he went on. He went to answer the telephone. I knew the floor creaked, so there was no chance of slipping into the other room and looking out that window. "It just means what I said," I said. He's scared shitless. Olla's face came on red again as she said this. "I'll just go down the line," she says. But you must be worn out. Or else maybe a worn-out old woman, one or the other anyway. But I didn't feel like reading. I know something's about to happen and I want to head it off. But Sunday afternoon, at the last minute, she calls and says for us to come eat with her. Am I getting warm? She drove. They had opened his packages while other packages wrapped in festive paper lay piled under the tree waiting for after six o'clock. The present tense narration emphasizes the "one day at a time" philosophy of rehabilitation; at the same time, the two main characters grope to resume distant, happier lives. He was a good boy except for his outbursts and that he could not tell the truth. There was a doctor sitting in a chair with his legs hooked over the back of another chair, watching an early-morning TV show. They'd ask for house specials--RC Colas with a shooter of whiskey--or else they'd bring in their own stuff under their coats, order RC, and build their own. A man answers. On June 13, less than three weeks before he died, Chekhov wrote a letter to his mother in which he told her his health was on the mend. She says, Why don't you wipe the blackboard clean and see what you have left after that? mrs Webster caught their attention and held a finger to her lips. I looked around. "Can I go swimming there?" We took Monday as a holiday and I wasn't by there again until Tuesday. She looked after things for Richard's mother before his aunt and her daughter moved in there. She'd begun to patty-cake with it, which pleased the baby somewhat. They played some records. We're going to be fine. Laura said, "Nothing's changed." Then I took heart and said to my wife, "The last time you wore that hat, you wore a veil with it and I held your arm. One place good as another? Every day and every night he'd attended to the children. He broke my heart that night. Yesterday morning he seemed just fine when he came down for breakfast. Look," he said, "I promise I'll be good for it this time, I swear to God. In a few minutes he gets up and says he is going to fix a nightcap. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said. He wants to kiss me goodbye. "Nothing," he said. I hadn't, but I planned to do so in about two shakes. "Gilbert, I'm warning you," the woman said. "What's wrong with you, man? He's my husband," Doreen said at last, shrugging. But all of his signs are fine. Things will be okay in the long run, once all the stages have been gone through. Crazy doesn't stop her from planning and getting on with her next move. "Bud?" Good-bye, sweetheart." I'm not a frivolous man, nor am I, in my opinion, a serious man. I never in my life saw you in a hat before. Furthermore, and quite simply, he loved the man. 26 "Can't you go to sleep, Nan?" In fact, I may be late for dinner." "Stuart, I'm so afraid, so afraid," I say, leaning against the door. The third day is hard, too, of course, but from then on, if you can stay with it that long, you're over the hump. I don't know anything, Ann. He laughed, he always had a laugh for you. Leo hurries to the window. I took out the knife. "Laying guilt trips," Jill called it. She came back with a little tin cup of water in each hand. Sit anyplace. Ann put her hand over the child's forehead. I wasn't after anything in particular unless it was rubbers again and though I had looked all over I had never found any. "Seven o'clock in the morning?" The lungs were outlined in blue, but the upper parts were filled in with red. He brought the receiver in close. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker's age--a man old enough to be her father--must have children who'd gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. I picked up my glass and finished the milk. It's all work, one way or the other, and I'm always glad to have it. What the hell's going on? The TV showed this one cathedral. The baby was red-faced and screaming. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn't even know! What's there to tell? "Let's get a stick. I can't say I was surprised to see the U-Haul still there in the front yard. "Come on," he says. He moved the curtain aside and looked out at the backyard. She said, "The phone went dead. And my grandpa," she says. She sat on a footstool, holding his hand, from time to time stroking his face. He kept his eyes closed, trying it out. I open my eyes. She put her finger into the pan once more, testing. She used to write me even after we weren't living together.