Virgil: “Did she ask about me? If she does, you could tell her I’m taken. For the time being anyway.”

“Don’t start,” Davenport said.

* * *

—

They ate steaks, and Davenport’s son Sam and Frankie’s son, also a Sam, roughhoused around the yard and shouted a few off-color words and were corrected in a desultory way. The adults talked about everything but crime, and toward the end of the evening a U.S. senator called Davenport to say that he was needed for a confidential job in Washington.

The senator gave Virgil a hard time for a few minutes—while governor, he’d been involved with Virgil when Virgil purchased his boat—then signed off after Davenport promised to call him the next day. At ten o’clock, Frankie followed Virgil and Sam out of Davenport’s driveway. Frankie and Virgil both had hands-free phone links in their vehicles and they raked over the details of Virgil’s case as they drove, finally giving up as they pulled into the barnyard.

Sam got out of the truck, and Honus the Yellow Dog, who’d been sleeping on the porch, ambled over in the dark to meet him.

“Don’t be going online,” Frankie said to her son.

“I’m too sleepy anyway,” Sam said, and Virgil rubbed his head.

* * *

—

Virgil woke up Sunday morning in his own bed, with gray clouds outside and a stiff wind blowing through the leaves of a sugar maple that grew in the side yard. He yawned, stretched, got up, and looked out the window. The hayfield was as slick as a Marine recruit’s haircut, not a single bale waiting to be thrown. He smiled to himself, stretched again, and went to get cleaned up.

Frankie was having a second cup of coffee when he made it down to the kitchen, and she said, “Virgie, we gotta talk.”

Virgil said, “Oh, shit. Listen, I didn’t have any choice about going up there. If I hadn’t been ordered to go, I would have thrown that hay. Really, I would have.”

“No, no, I’m not talking about hay. I want to tell you I enjoyed myself last night, but I’m getting pretty lumpy. We might have to, mmm, go easy on the more vigorous sex until the kids get here.”

“Oh, Jesus! Why didn’t you say something?” Virgil asked. “I’d never hurt you. I—”

“We’re not quite there yet. You didn’t hurt me, and I enjoyed the heck out of myself,” she said. “I’m not saying that the sex has to stop. We’ll have to go to, you know, alternatives.”

“I’m up for that,” Virgil said. “Anytime, anyplace. Well, almost anyplace. The roof of the barn wouldn’t be good. You’d probably roll off.”

“Thanks. Anyway, I figured you’d be cooperative.”

“Gotcha. We can start working on alternatives tonight,” Virgil said. “Or this afternoon . . . if I don’t have to do something with hay.”

“Barn’s full of hay. There won’t be any hay next year, so you’re in the clear. We’re four years into the alfalfa now, we need to kill it off. Rolf wants to rotate in some corn.”

She went on like that for a while, and Virgil heard “four years,” “Rolf,” as well as “alfalfa,” “corn,” and a couple other agricultural words, and when he realized she’d finished talking, he said, “You know what you’re doing, I can’t advise you. Except—”

“You going to advise me now,” she said.

“Yeah. I’ll advise you that next spring you’re going to have two new kids and not a hell of a lot of time to do farmwork or architectural salvage. I’ve got to keep working to bring in the cash. Maybe it’s time to ease off on the farming. And the salvage. Take a break. Or make a deal with Rolf: he does it all, he gets it all. He could use the money. That’d keep the company going.”

“I hate it when you talk sense.”

“I’m not often accused of doing that,” Virgil said. “Anyway, what are we doing today?”

“We could start by going down to Fleet Farm. I need two fence posts and some reflector buttons.”

* * *

—

They spent the late morning rolling around Mankato, running errands, stopped at a Pagliai’s Pizza for lunch, at the riverfront Hy-Vee’s, where they spent a hundred bucks on food that would hold them for maybe three days. Frankie talked about getting a couple of quarter horses so the kids would grow up with horses, in addition to Honus the Yellow Dog and the chicken.

“If we got horses, we’d have to build a stable,” Virgil said.

“I’ve got the materials from the salvage operation. Rolf says he can get Lonnie Marks to pour the foundation at cost, and then you two could build it. Easy: post and beam. I’m thinking six stalls, a tack room, storage for concentrates, a loft for the hay. I’m not thinking we do it in the next fifteen minutes. Maybe start it next spring, finish it a year later. The only thing that would be expensive are the rubber mats I’d want to put down on the concrete.”

“Who shovels the horseshit?” Virgil asked.

“Well, I mean, you know . . .”

“That’s what I thought,” Virgil said. But he liked the idea of horses. The image of himself galloping across the prairie. “We can talk about it.”

On the way home, they were silent, preoccupied by different thoughts. For the first time in his life, Virgil had responsibilities that he couldn’t walk away from—two kids on the way, a woman he wanted to marry and eventually, he thought, surely would.

That was not exactly what he’d seen coming. When he was in the Army, in the Balkans, he’d taken a couple of leaves in Europe. He’d somehow imagined a writing life, on one of the coasts, with frequent visits to Paris, his favorite big city.

Not happening. He was a cop living on a Midwestern farm well outside a small city.

Still, he thought, he had the writing. He was doing a dozen articles a year for a variety of magazines, had been published in Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine.

And was edging into something new. He hadn’t talked to Frankie about it, but he had three chapters of a novel in his writing drawer and was working on it regularly, so much so that he’d begged off a musky fishing trip to Canada with his old friend Johnson Johnson to keep it going.

* * *

—

That afternoon, Virgil did chores, including pulling out two old, rusting posts at the driveway entrance, then replacing them with two new wooden posts and mounting reflectors on them. That done, he spent three hours at his writing desk, sending out query letters to magazines about article assignments and working on the novel.