Two years after he was kicked down the stairs ofhis apartment building in NewYork City, which shattered his wrist, chipped his front tooth, and, as he himself put it, broke his heart, Daniel Emerson is back in his hometown, driving Ruby, his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter, to her day care center, called My LittleWooden Shoe.The drive is ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the weather, and though Daniel is not Ruby’s father, nor her stepfather, it usually falls to him to take the little girl in.Daniel cannot understand how she can so willingly and unfailingly absent herselffrom the beginnings ofher daughter’s day;Ruby’s mother, Kate Ellis, cannot bear to rise early in the morning, nor can she bear the thought ofhaving to deal with Melody, orTammy, Keith, Tamara, Grif-fin, Elijah, Avery, Stephanie, Joel, Tess, Chantal, Dylan, or any ofthe otherWooden Shoers, not to mention their fathers and their mothers, a few ofwhom Daniel knew thirty-two years ago in this very town, when he was Ruby’s age.

It’s fine with Daniel.He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell ofbaby sham-poo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter ofindustry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center ofcreation, some meaning, some pur-pose and poetry.He believes in parental love with the fervency ofa man who himself was not loved, and those ten minutes with Ruby every weekday morning, before he drops her offat My LittleWooden Shoe and then drives over to his office, where he runs a poorly paying, uneventful country law practice, in the fairly uneventful town ofLeyden, one hun-dred miles north ofNewYork City, those six hundred sweet seconds are his form ofworship, and the temperamental eight-year-old black Saab is his church.