"Sure. And if some Eskimo linguist studied us, he'd probably say English is amazing: separate, completely independent words for standing-water-in-large quantities, standing-water-in-medium-sized-quantities, standing-water-in-small-quantities-"

She wrinkled her nose. "Hold on now…"

"'Ocean,' 'lake,' and 'pond,'" he said. "We even have one for standing-water-in-teeny-weeny-quantities."

"Mmm…" Thinking, she stared out the window. "Puddle?"

"Now you're catching on, see?"

"Yes, I'm starting to. It's interesting. Now, what's your problem, exactly?"

"I can't seem to come up with a simple way of starting."

"Why don't you write what you just said? The whole bit, from the beginning?"

He looked at her. "That's a good idea, I will." But his face, which had momentarily cleared, fell. "What did I say?"

"Sorry," she said, "if I'd realized you weren't paying attention I'd have taken notes."

"God help me," he wailed, but he was laughing.

He was laughing more these days, she noted with pleasure. Not that he'd ever been ill-humored; far from it. But over the last year or so she'd begun to sense a lessening of verve, of the essential liveliness and interest in everything that had always been such a big part of him. She'd pondered on the possibilities of midlife crisis (he was 44), of career dissatisfaction (he was a full professor at the University of Washington's Port Angeles campus; where did he go from there?), and even-but only briefly and when she was in one of her own rare periods of insecurity-of boredom with their marriage.

It had taken her a while, but in the end she'd put her finger on it: it was Port Angeles itself, the remote, one-time lumbering town on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, where the university, in an effort to be ready for the sure-to-come population expansion from Seattle, had built a well-endowed, full-scale campus.