A shower of stones fell on the roof. He could hear them striking the shingles, rattling hollowly in the gutters, and he ran outside. Staring in disbelief, he could see them forming above the roof of the house, round white stones half the size of an egg. Binder picked one out of the grass and cupped his hand about it. It was warm to the touch.

A week later he left for baseball camp. That had, incidentally, been what the shouting match was about. The shower of stones was forgotten. He never thought of it again.

Chicago, 1980

They were living in an apartment on Clark Street in Chicago when Binder first began to feel he was living out the balance of someone else’s life. They had married his second year at the University of Tennessee and he immediately dropped out. He had to have more money. Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores. There seemed to be precious little money in Blount County that year, and none he could lay hands on.

He went to work in Corrie’s father’s furniture store, but that hadn’t lasted long. Then he went to work for a garment factory. That lasted a little longer. All this time he was writing. He began a novel, abandoned it. Began another, wearied of it. After eighteen months the factory shut its doors and Binder was out of a job.

For decades Chicago had been the gateway to another sort of life for the rootless of the South, and so it was for David Binder: he found a job first week there and in one month sent for Corrie.

Binder worked days as an assembler in a plant that made gauges for aircraft. He had enrolled in night classes with some vague idea that he might become an English teacher, Corrie enrolling just to be with him. They had little time for each other, for Binder was writing another novel in his spare moments, writing it without knowing why or even believing that it would be read by eyes other than his own. While he played at writing, Corrie played at housekeeping, pregnant already and little more than a child herself, unsure and willing to settle for whatever time Binder could give her. Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.

In two years’ time he would have achieved enough distance to look back on it with nostalgia, to remember it as the best of times, days and nights filled with purpose and ambition, but he did not know that then. Not in the dislocated otherworldly hour of two or three o’clock in the morning when he would put away the typescript and look at the clock with a grim foreboding, a man on a losing streak sweating the last card in a hand of five-card draw. Nor would he know it the next day, listening to the jungle of machinery, hypnotized and robotlike, his hands doing the selfsame job over and over until they seemed divorced from him, appendages that could have functioned as well without him.

When he finally stood looking down at the neat stack of typescript he had not an inkling of what to do with it, but having invested so many hours typing it and untold hours writing it and thinking about it, he knew he had to do something.

For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first. He and Corrie made a small ceremony of the trek down to the post office to mail it. One of the stamps the postman affixed to it bore the likeness of Eugene O’Neill and Binder wryly took that as a good omen.

In reality he expected to wait two or three months and get the manuscript back with a polite note of refusal; he was already trying to decide where to send it next. That was not the way it happened.

Scarcely a month later Corrie handed him a letter from Random House. Her face was white and solemn. She had opened it. He stood in the doorway, still holding his lunchbox, looking down at the letter, and he was suddenly afraid.