As for Virgil, she had her hopes but it was getting not to matter—the ones her age, if they had jobs, would stay around a few weeks, months at most. Each time she’d gotten her hopes up and each time it’d spoiled, they all wanted to be taken care of, for dinner to appear in front of them, it should have been a joke but it wasn’t. Half of them didn’t even put any effort into sex, you would have thought there’d at least be the dignity of that, but not even. At the library she’d signed up for an Internet dating service, but all the men her age were looking for women much younger, and even in the bars it seemed there was nothing for her but the fifty- and sixty- somethings, men expecting to screw women they could be the fathers of. So at least Virgil was coming back. Yes, she thought, now that it’s convenient for him, quiet little mouse that you are.

The snow was beginning to fall harder and she saw someone moving at the edge of the yard, drunk, she thought, playing around, pissing his name in the snow while the stoves are out of wood. Years earlier, just after Virgil left, she’d gotten a job offer in Philadelphia and she’d nearly taken it but Billy was doing so well in school, playing football, and she’d still had hopes that Virgil would come back to her quickly. She knew what that life would have looked like— thirty- five, apartment in the city, night school, single mom—like a movie. She would have married a lawyer. Finished her own degree. Instead she was living in Buell in a trailer with her spoiled child, man, whatever he was now, her son who had nearly had everything, a football scholarship, but had decided to stay home with his mother, going hungry if she didn’t cook his dinner. She wondered why she was in such a bad mood. Maybe something was happening.