He looked at her across the room, this woman he had walked on like a floor for thirteen years without ever once thinking about what held it up. He did not know what to say. Everything he could think of was either cruel or a lie.
"I'm going to sleep in the bunkhouse," he said finally.
She nodded. She did not try to stop him.
The bunkhouse had been Lyle Brekke's for eleven summers and had not been slept in for two. It smelled of mouse and old pipe tobacco. Wade lit the propane heater and lay on the narrow bed in his clothes and listened to it tick, and he did not sleep much. Once, near three, he got up and stood in the doorway and looked across the yard at the house, dark except for the faint orange of the dying fire through the family room window, and at the barn beyond it, and at the empty place on the far side of the barn where a white truck with one green door had been parked, by his count from the ledger, on thirty-odd evenings since July, while he was gone.
When he went up to the house at six, the kitchen was empty and the coffee was made. The red flannel shirt was folded square on the seat of his chair at the table, with the elk-skin gloves on top of it. On the gloves lay a piece of lined paper torn from a school notebook, and on it in fat pencil letters: FOR DANNY. I AM SORRY I TOOK IT. LOVE JUNE. And under that, smaller, as if she had come back and added it: PLEASE DONT BE MAD AT MOMMY.
He sat down in the chair next to his own and held the note for a long time.
* * *