Linda has not yet checked in with him. It must be going badly at their friends’ house. He has taken up his deer tine and his softest square of camel hide and has hunched into the furious burnishing of the edges of half a dozen messenger bags, filling himself with the smell of warming beeswax and edge paint, emptying himself of Robert’s voice and the family he has left behind. But shortly he hears the middle bay door creak open and closed. He looks across the floor. It’s Linda, and he thinks: Good. The antidote. Whatever of Robert and Peggy and William he has not been able to burnish away will vanish in five minutes with Linda. She is flushed from the sun and the cold and sheds her quilted coat as she approaches. Beneath, she is turtlenecked to her chin and is long-legged and slim-hipped in black dress-up jeans. She stops before him. She strips off her knit hat and shakes her hair down. “Your women are gone,” she says. “This is their day for Mavis’s wife to make them venison stew.”
