But I said to him, I remember well, “It’s all right. Thank you.”

We did not go straight out the Geraldine Road to our house. Instead my father went down another mile and turned, went a mile and turned back again so that we came home from the other direction. “I want to stop and listen now,” he said. “The geese should be in the stubble.” We stopped and he cut the lights and engine, and we opened the car windows and listened. It was eight o’clock at night and it was getting colder, though it was dry. But I could hear nothing, just the sound of air moving lightly through the cut field, and not a goose sound. Though I could smell the whiskey on my father’s breath and on mine, could hear the motor ticking, could hear him breathe, hear the sound we made sitting side by side on the car seat, our clothes, our feet, almost our hearts beating. And I could see out in the night the yellow lights of our house, shining through the olive trees south of us like a ship on the sea. “I hear them, by God,” my father said, his head stuck out the window. “But they’re high up. They won’t stop here now, Jackie. They’re high flyers, those boys. Long gone geese.”

There was a car parked off the road, down the line of wind-break trees, beside a steel thresher the farmer had left there to rust. You could see moonlight off the taillight chrome. It was a Pontiac, a two-door hard-top. My father said nothing about it and I didn’t either, though I think now for different reasons.

The floodlight was on over the side door of our house and lights were on inside, upstairs and down. My mother had a pumpkin on the front porch, and the wind chime she had hung by the door was tinkling. My dog, Major, came out of the quonset shed and stood in the car lights when we drove up.

“Let’s see what’s happening here,” my father said, opening the door and stepping out quickly. He looked at me inside the car, and his eyes were wide and his mouth drawn right.

We walked in the side door and up the basement steps into the kitchen, and a man was standing there—a man I had never seen before, a young man with blond hair, who might’ve been twenty or twenty-five. He was tall and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and beige slacks with pleats. He was on the other side of the breakfast table, his fingertips just touching the wooden tabletop. His blue eyes were on my father, who was dressed in hunting clothes.

“Hello,” my father said.

“Hello,” the young man said, and nothing else. And for some reason I looked at his arms, which were long and pale. They looked like a young man’s arms, like my arms. His short sleeves had each been neatly rolled up, and I could see the bottom of a small green tattoo edging out from underneath. There was a glass of whiskey on the table, but no bottle.

“What’s your name?” my father said, standing in the kitchen under the bright ceiling light. He sounded like he might be going to laugh.

“Woody,” the young man said and cleared his throat. He looked at me, then he touched the glass of whiskey, just the rim of the glass. He wasn’t nervous, I could tell that.