days, you can talk with someone and it will be so deep and the words will be so deep into you
that you can only laugh and be happy. Most of the time they aren’t bitter. If they are,” she’ll say,
“Let your heart break, because every little kindness matters.”
She will say a word or two, then move her attention to the baby. A rotation of this. She
will not stop purring, and he won’t mind. The occasional groan will escape the backroom, and,
for a moment after it does, she’ll pause, but with a look Dolt hasn’t seen, a pacified glance. Dolt
will listen as she continues—that life, if it’s real can be seen, even heard. You just know. He
wants to know, “Is life something you learn?”
“No,” she says, “it’s in the quietest voices. Or else it’s branded into you.”
*
He will wake up, most of the lights will be off, but not the guest room’s. Agriss wiggling
under covers. There’s a stir, that stir of an active mind—a gifted thing, really, with personality to
the hilt, mumbling to himself between laughs and winks, Agriss will confess things. He won’t
remember any of it.
Dolt leans in, “Here, have some water.”
“That’s your dad right there,” says Dolt, “He treats people right even when he doesn’t
have to. Your dad,” he will tell Dolt, without his accent, in some other voice, “he’s a good man.
And it’s hard to be a good man, it’s hard to be a good anything. Your dad is the guy that will help
someone out of that place. He’s the kind of guy who would walk up to us when we were still at
the kid’s table and ask how things were, and really mean it, too, and all the other adults might tell
some great fart jokes, but their faces changed whenever they turned away from you,” grinning,
more faded, “time to turn on those lights, kiddo.” Dolt Cameron, aware of only the sound of his
breathing and the snowy air, now, and recognizing the odor of gasoline, sees that, after tucking
Agriss in, he will walk barefoot outside and listen to the air and do his best to remember
promises.
*
The fuel is in the generator, but Forner and Agriss can’t start the thing—they yank at the
cord. They don’t ask Dolt Cameron if he will try, or notice his sudden quiet. Marianne stands at
the door, asks, “How is it going?” She rocks the baby, as four eyes peer round her thigh, clung to
it in the dark.
“Well-hell. What do we do now?” No one’s laughing anymore.
Agriss mumbles orders from under the generator. He says “AH-HA!”
And as he does the lights come on. There are lights near the gut