He glanced into the rearview mirror and briefly regarded his red, watery eyes. “I am not getting the fucking flu. Not when I’m on a roll.” Okay, but why in God’s name had he shaken that son of a bitch’s hand, when it had undoubtedly been crawling with germs? Ones so big you’d hardly need a microscope to see them? And since he had, why hadn’t he asked for the bathroom so he could wash them? Christ, his kids knew about hand-washing. He’d taught them himself.

“I am not getting the fucking flu,” he repeated, then dropped the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. To keep it from flaring in his eyes.

Flaring? Or glaring? Was glaring better, or was it too much?

He mused on this as he drove back to the cabin. He brought his groceries in and saw the message light was flashing. It was Lucy, asking that he call back as soon as possible. He felt that tug of annoyance again, the sense that she was looking over his shoulder, but then he realized it might not be about him. After all, not everything was. One of the kids might have gotten sick or had an accident.

He called, and for the first time in a long time—since The Village on the Hill, probably—they argued. Not as bad as some of the arguments they’d had in the first years of their marriage, when the kids had been small and money tight, those had been doozies, but bad enough. She had also heard about the storm (of course she had, she was a Weather Channel addict), and she wanted him to pack up and come home.

Drew told her that was a bad idea. Terrible, in fact. He had established a good working rhythm and was getting awesome stuff. A one-day break in that rhythm (and it would probably end up being two, or even three) might not put the book in jeopardy, but a change in his writing environment could. He would have thought she understood the delicacy of creative work—at least for him—after all these years, but it seemed she didn’t.

“What you don’t understand is how bad this storm is supposed to be. Haven’t you been watching the news?”

“No.” And then, lying for no good reason (unless it was because he felt spiteful toward her just now): “I have no reception. The dish doesn’t work.”

“Well, it’s going to be bad, especially up north in those unincorporated townships near the border. That’s where you are, in case you didn’t notice. They’re expecting widespread power outages because of the wind—”

“Good thing I brought Pop’s type—”

“Drew, will you let me finish? Just this once?”

He fell silent, his head throbbing and his throat aching. In that moment he didn’t like his wife very much. Loved her, sure, always would, but didn’t like her. Now she’ll say thank you, he thought.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know you took your father’s portable, but you’d be down to candlelight and cold food for days, maybe much longer.”

I can cook on the woodstove. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that, but if he broke in on her again, the argument would veer onto a new subject, the one about how he didn’t take her seriously, so on and so on and yada-yada-yada.

“I suppose you could cook on the woodstove,” she said, in a slightly more reasonable tone, “but if the wind blows like they say it’s going to—gale-force sustained, hurricane-force gusts—a lot of trees are going to fall down and you’ll be stuck out there.”

I planned to be out here, anyway, he thought, but again held his tongue.

“I know you were planning to be out there for two or three weeks, anyway,” she said, “but a tree could also knock a hole in the roof and the phone line is going to come down with the power line, and you’ll be cut off! What if something happened to you?”

“Nothing’s going to—”

“Maybe not, but what if something happened to us?”

“Then you’d take care of it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have gone haring off to the middle of nowhere if I didn’t think you could do that. And you have your sis. Besides, they exaggerate the weather reports, you know that. They turn six inches of fresh powder into the storm of the century. It’s all about ratings. This will be the same. You’ll see.”

“Thank you for mansplaining that,” Lucy said. Her tone was flat.

So here they were, going to that sore place he’d hoped to avoid. Especially with his throat, sinuses, and ear throbbing. Not to mention his head. Unless he was very diplomatic, they would be mired in the time-honored (or was dishonored more accurate?) argument about who knew better. From there they—no, she—could move onto the horrors of the paternalistic society. This was a subject upon which Lucy could expatiate endlessly.

“You want to know what I think, Drew? I think when a man says ‘You know that,’ which they do all the time, what they mean is ‘I know that, but you’re too dumb to know that. Hence, I must mansplain.’ ”

He sighed, and when the sigh threatened to turn into a cough, he stifled it. “Really? You want to go there?”

“Drew… we are there.”

The weariness in her tone, as if he were a stupid child that could not seem to get even the simplest lesson, infuriated him. “Okay, here’s a little more mansplaining, Luce. For most of my adult life, I’ve been trying to write a novel. Do I know why? No. I only know it’s the missing piece in my life. I need to do this, and I am doing it. It’s very, very important. You’re asking me to risk that.”

“Is it as important as me and the kids?”

“Of course not, but does it have to be a choice?”

“I think it is a choice, and you just made it.”

He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “That’s pretty melodramatic.”

She didn’t chase that one; she had something else to chase. “Drew, are you okay? Not coming down with something, are you?”

In his mind he heard the scrawny woman with the stud in her lip saying had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia.

“No,” he said. “Allergies.”

“Will you think about coming back, at least? Will you do that?”

“Yes.” Another lie. He already had thought about it.

“Call tonight, okay? Talk to the kids.”

“Can I talk to you, too? If I promise not mansplain anything?”

She laughed. Well, actually more of a chuckle, but still a good sign. “Fine.”

“I love you, Luce.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and as he hung up, he had an idea—what English teachers liked to call an epiphany, he supposed—that her feelings were probably not much different from his. Yes, she loved him, he was sure of it, but on this afternoon in early October, she didn’t like him much.

He was sure of that, too.

16

According to the label, Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy was twenty-six per cent alcohol, but after a healthy knock from the bottle that made Drew’s eyes water and brought on a serious coughing fit, he guessed the manufacturer might have lowballed the content. Maybe just enough to keep it off the Big 90’s liquor shelf with the coffee brandy, the apricot schnapps, and the Fireball Nips. But it cleared his sinuses most righteously, and when he spoke to Brandon that evening, his boy detected nothing out of the ordinary. It was Stacey who asked him if he was okay. Allergies, he told her, and repeated the same lie to Lucy when she took back her phone. At least there was no argument with her tonight, just the unmistakable trace of chill in her voice that he knew well.