Cardboard boxes crowd the linoleum floor like little barges bristling with their cargo: pots and pans, Mason jars, oven mitts, steak knives, more stuff than Alice can imagine she ever needed. The mood she’s in, she’s ready to turn out the cookstove. She doubts Harland would notice if she stopped cooking altogether. When she met him he was heating up unopened cans of Campbell’s soup in a big pot of water every night. It amazed her to see the cans rolling around like logs in the boiling water. “Don’t they bust?” she asked him, and he shyly put his hand on hers and allowed as how sometimes they did. His idea of a home-cooked meal is when you open the can first and pour it in a saucepan. Alice has been wasting her talents.

With aggressive strokes of her cleaning rag she reaches back into a high cabinet, feeling her Bermuda shorts slide up her thighs where the veins have turned a helpless blue.

She’s exposing herself to no one at the moment, but still feels embarrassed that her circulatory system has to start showing this way. Getting old is just a matter of getting easier to see through, until all your failing insides are in plain view and everyone’s business. Even the ads aimed at old people are embarrassing: bathroom talk. You’re expected to pull yourself inside-out like a sleeve and go public with your hemorrhoids.

It’s hard for Alice to picture the portion of her life that still lies ahead. Her friend Lee Shanks saw a religious call-in show about turning your life around through Creative Imaging, and Lee has been trying ever since to image a new Honda Accord. But when Alice closes her eyes she sees, at the moment, Mason jars. She knows that no woman with varicose veins and a brain in her head would walk away from a decent husband, but she’s going to anyway. Aloneness is her inheritance, like the deep heartline that breaks into match sticks across her palm. The Stamper women might sometimes think they’re getting somewhere, nailing themselves down to kin, but some mystery always cuts them loose from people in the long run. Her mother used to tromp around the farm with her eyes on the sky as if some sign up there said: FREEDOM

AND HAPPINESS THIS WAY, AT THE END OF THE LONELY ROAD.

Alice never wanted to be like her. She married young and misguided but with every intention of staying with her first husband, Foster Greer. She met him in a juke joint at the edge of the woods by the Old Miss slaughter pen, and on that very first night he danced her out to the parking lot and told her he was going to take her away from that smell.

Between the hog farm and the slaughter pen Alice had lived her whole life within a perimeter of stench, and didn’t know what he meant. It amazed her to discover that air, on its own, was empty of odor. She breathed through her nose again and again like an addict high on a new drug, and in the narrow parting of a highway cut through cyprus swamps they drove all the way to New Orleans before breakfast. Even now Alice can feel in her skin the memory of that crazy adventure: speeding through the alligator bayous at midnight, feeling alive and lucky, as if there were only one man and one woman on earth this night and they were the ones chosen.

As a husband, though, Foster wore his adventures thin.

He made a career of what he called “fresh starts,” which meant getting fired from one house-framing job after another and consoling himself with Old Grand-Dad. Anything that’s worth doing, he told Alice, is worth starting over right in a new town. And then he told her she was too much fun, as if it were her fault he could never settle down. He made Alice promise she would never try anything cute like getting pregnant, and she didn’t, for nearly ten years. It wasn’t so easy in those days; it was an endeavor. When it finally did happen, she’d known Foster long enough to know a good trade when she saw one, him for a baby. He had given her fresh air, but that’s not such a gift that you have to stay grateful your whole life long. When he moved on from Pittman, Alice and the baby stayed.

She’d believed that motherhood done fiercely and well would end her family’s jinx of solitude; Alice threw herself into belief in her daughter as frankly as Minerva had devoted herself to hogs. But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right.

It’s one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run. She looks at the clock again: seven-thirty in Tucson. She picks up the phone and dials.

A baritone voice says, “Yo.”

That would be Jax. Alice feels ridiculous. What she saw on TV was not about Taylor and Turtle. They are probably still in bed. “Oh, well, hi,” she says. “Its me, Alice.”

“Hey, pretty Alice. How’s your life?”

“It’ll do,” she says. She never knows what she ought to say to Jax. She hasn’t met him and finds him hard to picture.