“Road. You call it a road, out in the country. Or if you’re Judson Crandall, I guess you call it a rud.”

“Okay, across the rud. He invited me over for a beer. I think I’m going to take him up on it. I’m tired, but I’m too jived-up to sleep.”

Rachel smiled. “You’ll end up getting Norma Crandall to tell you where it hurts and what kind of mattress she sleeps on.”

Louis laughed, thinking how funny-funny and scary-it was, the way wives could read their husbands’ minds after a while.

“He was here when we needed him,” he said. “I can do him a favor, I guess.”

“Barter system?”

He shrugged, unwilling and unsure how to tell her that he had taken a liking to Crandall on short notice. “How’s his wife?”

“Very sweet,” Rachel said. “Gage sat on her lap. I was surprised because he’s had a hard day, and you know he doesn’t take very well to new people on short notice under the best of circumstances. And she had a dolly she let Eileen play with.”

“How bad would you say her arthritis is?” “Quite bad.”

“In a wheelchair?”

“No… but she walks very slowly, and her fingers…

Rachel held her own slim fingers up and hooked them into claws to demonstrate.

Louis nodded. “Anyway, don’t be late, Lou. I get the creeps in strange houses.”

“It won’t be strange for long,” Louis said and kissed her.

6

Louis came back later feeling small. No one asked him to examine Norma Crandall; when he crossed the street (rud, he reminded himself, smiling), the lady had already retired for the night. Jud was a vague silhouette behind the screens of the enclosed porch. There was the comfortable squeak of a rocker on old linoleum. Louis knocked on the screen door, which rattled companionably against its frame. Crandall’s cigarette glowed like a large, peaceable firefly in the summer darkness. From a radio, low, came the voice of a Red Sox game, and all of it gave Louis Creed the oddest feeling of coming home.