Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

ways with me.”
    She did as she was told. She walked in one of the wheel tracks, he in the other. The sky seemed to be lighter ahead and there was a different sound—something like mild and rhythmical conversation.
    The road turned to wood and the trees on either side were gone.
    “Walk out on it,” he said. “Go on.”
    He came close and touched her waist as if he was guiding her. Then he took his hand away, left her to walk on these planks which were like the deck of a boat. Like the deck of a boat they rose and fell. But it wasn’t a movement of waves, it was their footsteps, his and hers, that caused this very slight rising and falling of the boards beneath them.
    “Now do you know where you are?” he said.
    “On a dock?” she said.
    “On a bridge. This is a floating bridge.”
    Now she could make it out—the plank roadway just a few inches above the still water. He drew her over to the side and they looked down. There were stars riding on the water.
    “The water’s very dark,” she said. “I mean—it’s dark not just because it’s night?”
    “It’s dark all the time,” he said proudly. “That’s because it’s a swamp. It’s got the same stuff in it tea has got and it looks like black tea.”
    She could see the shoreline, and the reed beds. Water in the reeds, lapping water, was what was making that sound.
    “Tannin,” he said, sounding the word proudly as if he’d hauled it up out of the dark.
    The slight movement of the bridge made her imagine that all the trees and the reed beds were set on saucers of earth and the road was a floating ribbon of earth and underneath it all was water. And the water seemed so still, but it could not really be still because if you tried to keep your eye on one reflected star, you saw how it winked and changed shape and slid from sight. Then it was back again—but maybe not the same one.
    It was not until this moment that she realized she didn’t have her hat. She not only didn’t have it on, she hadn’t had it with her in the car. She had not been wearing it when she got out of the car to pee and when she began to talk to Ricky. She had not been wearing it when she sat in the car with her head back against the seat and her eyes closed, when Matt was telling his joke. She must have dropped it in the cornfield, and in her panic left it there.
    When she had been scared of seeing the mound of Matt’s navel with the purple shirt plastered over it, he had not minded looking at her bleak knob.
    “It’s too bad the moon isn’t up yet,” Ricky said. “It’s really nice here when the moon is up.”
    “It’s nice now, too.”
    He slipped his arms around her as if there was no question at all about what he was doing and he could take all the time he wanted to do it. He kissed her mouth. It seemed to her that this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving, a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied.
    “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
    He turned her around, and they walked back the way they had come.

    “So was that the first you ever been on a floating bridge?”
    She said yes it was.
    “And now that’s what you’re going to get to drive over.”
    He took her hand and swung it as if he would like to toss it.
    “And that’s the first time ever I kissed a married woman.”
    “You’ll probably kiss a lot more of them,” she said. “Before you’re done.”
    He sighed. “Yeah,” he said. Amazed and sobered by the thought of what lay ahead of him. “Yeah, I probably will.”
    Jinny had a sudden thought of Neal, back on dry land. Neal giddy and doubtful, opening his hand to the gaze of the woman with the bright-streaked hair, the fortune teller. Rocking on the edge of his future.
    No matter.
    What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

Family Furnishings

    Alfrida. My father called her Freddie. The two of them were first cousins and lived for a while on adjoining farms. One day they were out in the fields of stubble playing with my father’s dog, whose name was Mack. That day the sun shone, but did not melt the ice in the furrows. They stomped on the ice and enjoyed its crackle underfoot.
    How could she remember a thing like that? my father said.
    She made it