Five years later.
The moonless night sky in the high desert was black as the finest pitch and sprinkled with tiny diamonds. The stars did not even blink this far above sea level. There was precious little atmosphere between him and them to interfere with their light.
The Milky Way presented as it must have been when the ancients, who did not have the veil of artificial light to mute it, gazed upon the swath of white and invented stories of gods to account for the wonder.
He tilted his head back and breathed out a plume of translucent pearl mist into the crisp air. It rose straight up, no wind at all to mix it. No wind to make twinkle twinkle little star.
He picked out Orion's Belt. Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, once hard points, were now fuzzy. He had a pair of cheap 2.25 readers in his pocket which would bring them back into focus, but putting them on would remind him that he was getting old.
A car turned from the highway into the drive. The headlights lit up the construction equipment and supplies in the field near the house. The car parked and the lights went out.
The door opened and shut.
**********
She had jerked with surprise when he sat down beside her. He didn't acknowledge her, just kept his eyes on his daughter and son-in-law holding the white bundle at the altar. When it was his time to go to the front he rose and waited for her to walk beside him. He spoke the words of promise and trust and commitment the parents had written for the ceremony and stood attentive and respectful as she spoke hers.
Then they sat down and watched.
He felt her glancing back and forth between their granddaughter's baptism and his face.
He did not look at her the whole time, but when the short ritual was done, he spoke, again without facing her.
"If you want to continue the conversation, you know where. Nine."
And he left.
**********
And here she was.
He heard her footsteps crunch in the hard coating of snow, like she was walking on fresh gravel. The light from the back porch was just enough to guide her past the house, through the garden beds, and into the field where he stood waiting.
There was a long skidmark in the snow where he had dragged a bale of hay. When she got close, he offered her the bale with an open hand.
She sat.
They regarded each other in the faint glow of a winter's evening. Their shadows went sideways from the distant manmade yellow light and straight down from the white starlight.
The last time they had been in these exact places. It had been a bright hot summer day. A mattress had been burning in the space between them, the flames snapping and the radiant heat making their faces hot.
She had been sobbing. He had been vibrating with barely contained rage.
This evening they both shivered.
"You look well," she said at last. Her voice was neutral.
"You look beautiful," he responded.
She made a slight movement of her shoulders. "Our granddaughter is beautiful."
"And cursed."
"What?" She was not neutral now. "Why would you say such a thing?"
"She's a Christmas baby," he said. "For the rest of her life people will give her one present and tell her it is for her birthday and for Christmas."
She laughed. It was the honest laugh he remembered.
"Wh--" She started and stopped and obviously rethought her question. He knew she wanted to say: Where have you been? How long will you be in town?
How many women have you fucked?
"What do you want?" She finally managed.
"I wanted to see my family. Old and new."
"Bullshit. You've been sneaking in ever since she found out she was pregnant. I thought I would run into you one of those times."
He had thought so too. It was a small town. In three days of normal life you met every other citizen at least once. But he had come straight in and gone straight out, visiting none of his old haunts, not stopping to shop or get gas or a drink. Like a ghost.
He knew his daughter had spilled it. He had requested that she not tell her mother, but it had not been an order. He realized the mother daughter thing was strong. But his daughter had not told her the dates beforehand. And he had not run into any bullshit ambush reconciliation attempts.
He knew the temptation for that trickery must have been strong for both his daughter and his son. The breakup of the family had been hard on them. Luckily, they had each married stable partners and had good jobs.
He and she had raised them right.
"How's work?" he asked.
Her head jerked up. "You fucking know how my work is. You have a goddamn army of spies in this valley."
He nodded. "We grew up here. You know how it is. Everybody knows everything. You could have moved."
"Away from the kids? No way. I have been looking forward to being a grandmother for a long time."
"So..." he ignored her anger. "Still at the high school."
She laughed bitterly. "That's right. The place we hated. Couldn't get away from it fast enough." Her gaze swept the horizon. "Couldn't wait to graduate and escape this claustrophobic isolated backwards little shithole. How did that work out for us?"
He wanted to say It had been working out pretty well, once upon a time.
But that was the past. He had made himself a promise. He would try to avoid pushing on those splinters.
"I was devastated when I lost--" She nodded at the barn, meaning it all. The house they had built, the horses they had bred. The herd. The equipment sheds, the combines, balers, loaders, the whole operation.
"And you knew it was going to happen, you son of a bitch." Her words were angry but her tone was flat, like the emotions had been faded by being unpacked and examined in bright sunlight too often.
He nodded. "I could tell you wouldn't let him go."
"My lawyer said the restrictions and covenants your lawyer put in the settlement were invalid and unenforceable. He said he could break the trust it set up." She was back to neutral now, an observer only.
Her lawyer had been wrong.
She had initially gotten the ranch and 90% of the monetary assets on the condition that she have no contact with her young lover. One week after the divorce decree, the kid showed up at the house. One day after that, a photo of him on the porch with his arms around her was delivered to court and she was evicted.
The ranch went up for sale and brought a good price, of which she got half. Cash-wise it was probably a wash, but she lost the home where they had raised their children.
"I bought the Mahoney house over on Utah Street." She pretended that he did not know.
"I dated Connie Mahoney in ninth grade," he said. "That's a good location. You can walk to Main Street and the high school."
She stared off into the distance for a long time.
"He stayed until the end of the semester," she said. "Stuck it out to prove he wasn't afraid of you or your threats."
He said nothing. He made no movement.
"But he was," she said quietly. "You terrified him. The longer nothing happened the more paranoid he got. Finally-- he would hear a noise outside and... he wouldn't be able to... perform."
"Not my finest hour," he said.
The mist of her breath became quicker, smaller.
"Nor mine," she said, and let that thought hang between them.
"He transferred," she continued. "Haven't heard from him since."
She had admitted in one of the therapy sessions they thought might save them that her attraction to the kid was irrational, fiery, magical, addictive. Sexual on a primal, inexplicable level she had never felt before.
She had not been able to keep the longing from showing on her face when she said that, and it punished him so deeply he had thought his body might shut down right there.
Their marriage had effectively ended the second she spoke those words.
Now, he heard in her voice that those passions had cooled to darkness. As he suspected they would.
But way too late to save what they once had.
"I learned a new word," she said. "Which is always handy for an English teacher. Limerence. It's an obsession with another person that involves an all-consuming passion."
She smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Generally regarded as unhealthy."
She paused. It was very dark out here, but she could see his eyes. He was somewhere else. Sometime else.
"You still hate me," she said. Didn't even make it a question.
"I have thought on it a bit," he said after some minutes. "Remember the cheap carnivals that used to come through every summer? Most of them had that horserace game, where you shot a jet of water into a funnel to make your horse slide along the track against the other player's horses?"
She nodded. She remembered running into him at one of those carnivals, must have been seventh grade or so, and feeling an unfamiliar excitement in her gut.
"There are three horses in my game. One is love, one is hate, and one is don't give a shit. They trade places when I am distracted, but I try to focus on aiming my water straight into the target so that don't give a shit stays way ahead."
She pondered that for a while, recalling the garish plastic horses, the wavy track, the harsh organ music playing all around the collection of food stands and noisy mechanical rides.
"Why aren't you married?" he said suddenly.
She thought about standing up and just walking off, the way he had done five years ago. But she didn't move.
"And who the hell would I marry?" she said angrily. "You know these people. They still think of us as a couple. Nobody who knew us before would dare to ask me out. I had dates with new teachers, but after they had lived here for a while and heard the way it was.... They lost interest."
"Those were the times I thought seriously about moving out of the valley." She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, but made no protest.
He took off his knit cap, walked over to her, and held it out. She shook her head, but he dropped it into her lap and raised the hood of his jacket over his head.
