Part One: Two in the Morning

The telephone on the nightstand did not ring.

It was on vibrate and it rattled against the pine top with a dry sound like a loose tenon working in its mortise, and I had the receiver up before the second one.

“Roland.” My mother’s voice had the planed edge it got when she had been awake a long time and was not going to mention it.

“Get dressed.

Come to the house.”

“It’s two in the morning, Agnes.”

“Jolene’s had the baby,” she said.

“Come to the house.”

And then she hung up, which she has done at the end of every telephone call she has ever made to me, including the ones where I was the one with something to say.

Clara sat up beside me.

The cabin was freezing; I had let the stove go out at eleven because wood was wood.

“What did she say?”

“Jolene had the baby.”

“Tonight?”

“Apparently.”

I pulled my flannel shirt off the peg by the door and found my trousers and my boots in the dark.

The brass key to my workshop was in the pocket where it always was, cold against my hand, and I remember holding it for a second longer than I needed to.