“Daddy?” Ellie said from the back seat. She had stopped crying as well. Even Gage had stopped fussing. Louis savored the silence.

“What, love?”

Her eyes, brown under darkish blond hair in the rearview mirror, also surveyed the house, the lawn, the roof of another house off to the left in the distance, and the big field stretching up to the woods.

“Is this home?”

“It’s going to be, honey,” he said.

“Hooray!” she shouted, almost taking his ear off. And Louis, who could sometimes become very irritated with Ellie, decided he didn’t care if he ever clapped an eye on Disney World in Orlando.

He parked in front of the shed and turned off the wagon’s motor.

The engine ticked. In the silence, which seemed very big after Chicago and the bustle of State Street and the Loop, a bird sang sweetly in the late afternoon.

“Home,” Rachel said softly, still looking at the house.

“Home,” Gage said complacently on her lap.

Louis and Rachel stared at each other. In the rearview mirror, Eileen’s eyes widened.

“Did you-”

“Did he-”

“Was that-”

They all spoke together, then all laughed together. Gage took no notice; he only continued to suck his thumb. He had been saying “Ma” for almost a month now and had taken a stab or two at something that might have been “Daaa” or only wishful thinking on Louis’s part.

But this, either by accident of imitation, had been a real Word Home.

Louis plucked Gage from his wife’s lap and hugged him.

That was how they came to Ludlow.

2

In Louis Creed’s memory that one moment always held a magical quality-partly, perhaps, because it really was magical, but mostly because the rest of the evening was so wild. In the next three hours, neither peace nor magic made an appearance.