“What?”

“You.”

“Me and what.”

“Whatever happened two Fridays ago. With your telephone guy.”

“Nothing happened. I told you that. Over and out.”

“But you were like, Category Five obsessed. How’s that just over?”

She had told Dovey the outlines of her affair, after the torment rose so high in her throat she felt she would choke. And if Dovey had seen reason to judge, she didn’t say so. The better part of friendship might be holding one’s tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage. Dovey had weathered her own run-ins with strange fortune, in several varieties including the man kind, and seemed to understand the appetite for self-destruction. What stumped her now was the return of sensible behavior. Dellarobia could see the perspective. Of the two events, the latter did seem further outside the standard script.

“If I had a reasonable explanation, you would hear it, Dovey. This is all I can tell you: it wasn’t my decision. Something happened. I was blind, but now I see.”

“Now you’re talking crazy. Is this something religious?”

Dellarobia was at pain to answer. In twenty years she’d sheltered nothing from Dovey, but there were no regular words for this. When you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, the flames will not set you ablaze. That was the book of Isaiah. “It’s not religious,” she said.

“I know you,” Dovey said. “And I don’t get this.”

“Me either.”

“Okay, but we’re not done.”

“Okay, go back to work, bye. I hear the rescue squad.”

The shearing crew must have wrapped things up. She could hear them outside the front door, stomping the muck off their barn boots. Dellarobia knew she should look alive so Hester wouldn’t call her Lazy Daisy, but the weight of her baby’s sweet sleeping body kept her immobile on the couch. The collies rushed in and circled the toy-strewn living room like the sheriff’s posse in an old western, surveying the wrecked Indian camp, then retreated upstairs. The tumbling dog feet on the stairs sounded like a waterfall in reverse.

From her horizontal position she watched Bear lean over Luther in an intimidating way, apparently in disagreement over payment due. Surely Bear wouldn’t push it too far. Sheep farmers lived in dread of getting crossed off Luther’s list for some infraction, such as trying to short the head count when they wrote his check. As the only shearer in the county, Luther’s skills probably put him in greater demand than any doctor or drug dealer out there. Dellarobia and Cub had actually changed the date of their hastily planned wedding when it turned out to be the day Luther had put the Turnbows on his calendar for shearing. She’d argued with Hester about it, and still to this day felt humiliated by the priority, but they’d ended up moving the wedding from October to November: first trimester to second. Not that she’d been showing that much yet, but the compromise felt significant. That was over a decade ago, and even then Luther was the last shearer standing. Younger men wanted nothing to do with such hard work, preferring to drive some rig or gaze at a screen.

She glanced around for Cub, but he hadn’t come in. Hester had probably left him to sweep up. She and the other ladies were washing up at the kitchen sink, and Crystal was nowhere to be seen, probably off somewhere plotting to have another horrible child and dump that one on Dellarobia too. No word of thanks would be forthcoming, she assumed. She sat up gently and settled Cordie in the sofa cushions, warning Preston to keep the roughhousing away from her. Jazon and Mical were using the edge of a CD to press down cornerwise on Legos and make them pop into the air. She stretched her stiff back, waiting for acknowledgment from someone who had attained the age of reason.

“You’re welcome,” she announced finally. “I’ll go see if my husband needs any help.” All four women turned simultaneously to gawk at her, as if her life had become a bad school play. “The kids are hungry,” she added. “If y’all are about to feed yourselves, you might think of them while you’re at it.”

The shadows outside were longer than she’d expected, the long dusk of wintertime. Bear’s penned hounds were snuffling and growling low in their throats, maybe catching wind of some raccoon on the ridge they pined to chase down and take apart. The wind banged the doors of the metal building behind the house where Bear had his machine shop, in the middle of what looked like a truck graveyard. Dellarobia had never even entered that shop, knowing it would make her homesick for the long-ago place where her own father built furniture. Even this fleeting thought, the shop doors banging, socked her with a memory of sitting on his shoulders and touching the cannonball tops of bedposts he’d spooled out of wood with his lathes.

She drew a very squashed pack of cigarettes from the back pocket of her jeans and lit up, thinking that if someone had asked her to wait one minute longer for it, she might have taken them out. She was trying hard not to smoke around the kids. Just a couple of sneaks, one of them when she’d gone upstairs to hide Jazon’s shoe, and that was it, in over six hours. In truth, Hester’s reproach the other day had left its impression. Dellarobia now felt her foggy head clear as she picked her way across the muddy ground and entered the fluffy storm inside the barn, where fluorescent lights blazed and it looked as if it had snowed indoors. She found the broom exactly where she’d left it, beside the leaf rake and boxes of trash bags. If Cub was cleaning up, he was doing it without much in the way of technology. Where was he? When she opened her mouth to speak, she had a weird feeling that squeaky muppet voice would come ratcheting out. And that he would answer in a child’s voice. She was not born into this family business, which explained her low-ranking position, but they had no excuse for treating Cub as they did. How could a man amount to much when his parents’ expectations peaked at raking up waste wool? Dellarobia doubted she’d have much gumption either, if she’d been raised by a mother like Hester. The woman ran all horses with the same whip. She’d even aimed some hits at the shearer today about second cuts, but he’d ignored her, exactly as he ignored Bear’s posturing. Maybe that vibrating metal cylinder next to Luther’s skull drowned out the whole family. Dellarobia could use a thing like that.

“Cub?” she called, and heard a faint reply. Animal or husband, she couldn’t say. She peered into the paddocks one after another, all empty of sheep. The shearing stall was knee-deep in belly wool, so Crystal must have abandoned her post as cleanup girl after about ten seconds. Lucky her, she could defect without getting court-martialed. Dellarobia called Cub’s name repeatedly and heard an answer each time, eventually realizing it was coming from overhead. She climbed the narrow stairs to the hay mow and found him lying on his back across a row of hay bales. This time of year the mow should have been packed like a suitcase, filled side to side and top to bottom, but the cavernous loft was more than half empty. They’d lost the late-summer cutting because three consecutive rainless days were needed for cutting, raking, and baling a hay crop. All the farmers they knew had leaned into the forecasts like gamblers banking on a straight flush: some took the risk, mowed hay that got rained on, and lost. Others waited, and also lost.