"Go home," Wade said finally.
Danny nodded. He did not move. "Are you going to call him?"
"I don't know yet." It was the truest thing he had said all day. "Go home. Don't come back on this place until I tell you to."
"Yes sir."
The boy walked around the front of the truck and got in, and the green door shut with its hollow, mismatched clang, and the engine caught on the third try. Wade stood and watched the one cocked headlight swing across the yard and climb the lane toward the county road and turn north, toward Grass Range, and then disappear. He stood there a long time after it was gone, until the cold came up through the soles of his boots, and then he went into the barn and sat down on the overturned bucket in the tack room under the chalk drawing of a big stick figure and a little one standing beside a truck, and he put his face in his hands.
* * *
It was nearly ten when he came back in. June was asleep; he could tell from the silence upstairs, the particular weight of it. Claire was sitting on the hearth with her knees drawn up and a fresh fire going behind her, and the red flannel shirt was folded on the arm of the leather sofa with the elk-skin gloves on top, where she must have set it when she came down.