He was even more a fitful sleeper, nearing sixty years, than he'd been when young. A sound woke him before dawn. He listened, eyes closed, but whatever it had been was gone. He turned his head and looked out the windows. The leaves on the trees were barely visible, and their shadows on the wall a slightly darker blur, waving back and forth in the wind. He should get up; he was unlikely to fall asleep again.

The two-note call of a chickadee resumed. Ah; that was what had wakened him. Another bird, more distant, answered the near one. Here I am, the first said. Here I am, the other answered. The calls went on for a good ten minutes.

This was the hour with the fewest expectations. He could lie still and listen to birds. He could watch the shadows of the leaves.

His wife lay separated from him by half the width of the great bed. She slept on her side, one arm stretched toward him, in a characteristic gesture: she reached to touch him, and to ask his help, and to help him.

The covers were at her waist. She wore a flannel nightgown. He had asked her hundreds of times to sleep nude, but she wouldn't. Except after sex, when she sometimes fell asleep while talking, she woke up clothed, as she had gone to bed. The nightgown looked little different than it would have hanging in the closet: almost empty. She was slender as a girl, except for the girth at her stomach the babies had added. Even that was small, and sometimes didn't show. Neither did her chest. Hers were the breasts most girls had right after their leggy stage, before they'd fully developed.

Her face was in shadow. He pictured her wrinkles. She had three wavy lines in the center of her forehead. When she looked up at him, or showed surprise, the lines sharpened and became the shape of a flattened letter w. The outside corners of her eyes radiated more lines, which deepened when she smiled. She should have stayed out of the sun. Her skin was rough, and she'd been to the dermatologist several times to have growths removed, from an ear, and her neck, and her nose. She seemed not to care that she'd damaged herself. She seemed scarcely to know: he'd had to point them out to her.

Her head lay high on the pillow, hair touching the carved headboard. When they made love in the missionary position, her preferred way, they tended to ride up until her crown bumped the wood. Many times they had to stop and move down toward the foot of the bed, to save her banging her skull against the wood. How many times had they had sex in this bed? At least a hundred times a year, despite all his travel. Multiply by a quarter century, more or less. Well into the thousands. And still she was so eager that she kept him coming to her, flattered by her pleasure.

He wondered about the children's sex lives. The kids never talked about the subject. He'd never had to explain sex to them. They seemed to have absorbed it at an early age, unlike him, who had been tutored by that college girl one summer. Emily had been home on vacation, and liked sex, and chose him to give it. Thank God for her matter-of-fact attitude. Gabriel and Melody seemed to have that same sort of functional view of sex. Wyatt guessed that this sprang from the clinical approach of the health classes they'd taken in school. He hoped their partners had the opposite attitude: Ada's. All these years later, and still she viewed the act of love as sacred and astonishing. She had never lost her tenderness, her gentleness, her surprise.

A window rattled from a gust. The house needed work. He really ought to get up. That window was loose; the gutters had filled with leaves; some of the paint was flaking; doors needed weatherstripping replaced; there was a new creak in the bedroom floor. And there was that big branch between the house and the garage that would soon threaten damage if the wind broke it. He'd take care of that today. The house, pasted together top and bottom, always needed something: the great ship of their marital voyage, reliable, often unnoticed, but always with small problems. This year, finally, he would caught up, so he could maintain the house by fixing things before they went wrong.

He woke later to the sound of splashing from the bathroom. Ada's showers tended to be short, so Wyatt flipped back the covers and went to join her.

The stall was steamed over. He flipped the light switch off and on, to let her know he was there. Behind the frosted glass, her shadow paused, and turned toward him.

He picked up a dry wash cloth and opened the door and stepped in. She liked him to wash her hair. He handed her the dry cloth.

"Thank you," she said. She turned her back to the water and covered her eyes. He detached the shower nozzle and wetted down her hair, then worked in the shampoo. He liked feeling the little irregularities of her skull under his fingertips.

"Why don't you grow your hair out?" he asked.

"It's too much work taking care of it."

"I'll wash it for you."

"You're gone too much. I'd have to do it when you're out making records."

"It would almost be worth it," he said, "to stay home. Just to see it long. The only time it ever was was when you were married to Owen. You've never grown it for me."

"And I never will, unless you stop going away."

Going away. She still called his studio work and touring going away. She hated being alone.

"Your hair's so fine," he said. "So soft. I could wash it for hours."

"At least I don't have any gray yet."

This wasn't true, but he didn't say so. She'd notice soon enough.

She bowed her head, the cloth still held to her eyes, and he sprayed her hair with the nozzle, rubbing to get the foam out. The shampoo ran off as a white drizzle, then changed to clear water in sheets that split, and split again, to become cascades of drops.

He fixed the nozzle back in place. She held him, her cheek against his chest, and he rested his chin on top of her head. The water ran from him onto her. The skinny girl ribs under his fingers were like a xylophone.

"Did you notice how quiet the house was this morning?" she asked.

"Yes. It was great."

"How can you say that? It's lonely. I miss the children. The sounds of playing. Even their arguments."

"I don't. I like the quiet."

"Why can't we adopt? So many babies need parents."

"I've done my part. I raised three. That's enough. I want a quiet old age, with nobody but you. I want to travel."

"I want to stay here and play with a baby. Children are a joy. You loved all three of them."

"Loved," he said. "Past tense. No more. Time to relax now."

"Can't we?"

"Only if it's part time."

She tipped her head. "I have water in my ear," she said.

They couldn't get the fluid out, no matter how much she tipped her head and shook it.

"I have an idea," he said. "Wait here."

He brought a drinking straw from the kitchen, holding it behind his back. "Close your eyes and don't move."

She bridled when he put the straw to her ear, then settled. He sucked out the water.

"It's gone!" she said. "Thank you."

She insisted they go back to bed and read for an hour, though he wanted to work. He couldn't concentrate on his book.

"Settle down," she said. "You're distracting me."

"I want to get started. I'll make breakfast."

He called her when the eggs and toast and melon were ready. She came to the table in jeans and tee shirt.

"I thought you'd serve me in bed," she said.

"I thought 'serving you in bed' referred to something else."

"Nasty man. Where's the juice?"

"We're out."

"Add it to the list. Let's go this morning."

He went to the refrigerator. A pad of paper was stuck to the door, with a pencil on a string. He wrote "o.j." and stuck the pencil back in the loop at the top of the pad.

He practiced piano for an hour while his wife did the dishes and some ironing. Then he drove her to the grocery store and pushed the cart while she consulted the list. He regretted coming; this was a chore he usually avoided because her dawdling irritated him. She was efficient at everything else, but here she was unable to organize her purchases by aisle. She read the list from top to bottom, and ended by walking back and forth.

"You'd do this faster if you thought about the other stuff you needed on the aisle," he said.

"I've never learned how."

"Then let me."

"There are two solutions: either you can wait outside, or you can do the shopping by yourself. Which one is it going to be?"

He hated this place. He hated the tile, and the lights, and the millions of products, and squeezing past other carts in the aisle, and the endless procession of searching, acquiring, and searching again. He shut up and stuck to pushing the cart.

The rest of the morning, and the first part of the afternoon, he scraped the paint from the flaking south side of the house, where it weathered faster. When his back began to hurt he returned the scraper to his toolbox.

He lay on the sofa with Ada, listening to music while she graded papers on a lap board. They were parallel and facing each other, Ada on the inside, against the cushions. He listened twice to a CD a friend had ripped for him, a collection of music by old acquaintances. They'd started repeating themselves, or imitating themselves; there was little out of the ordinary in this.

Wyatt kissed his wife on the forehead and knelt beside the couch to embrace her. She was warm through her clothes, but her cheek against his felt cold. The room was suddenly void, as if all substance had been sucked out of it. He felt dizzy.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

"It's like the opposite of deja vu. Like my skin isn't the right size, or everything in the room is cockeyed. It's strange. You're the only thing that's real."

She said, "Then there's no problem, is there?"

He shook his head, like a dog shedding water.

"Are you all right?" she asked. "Seriously."

"Yes. It's gone."

"What was it?"

"I don't know." He kissed her forehead again, and touched noses. "I was an alien in my own body there." He shook himself again. "Forget it. I have to trim that branch."

"Maybe you should stay inside."

"No. That's the chore for the day. Cut it off, and cut it up. It's getting big enough to damage the house. Or the garage. Or even the power line."

He pulled the ladder off the side of the house and collapsed it and carried it to the back, where he unfurled it again. He lowered it, hauling back on the fifth rung to control the speed at which the ladder dropped forward. The muscles in his back strained, then released. The top of the ladder rested on the branch with inches to spare.

He hadn't used the chainsawo for nearly a year and he had to yank the cord a dozen times. When the engine caught, it released a cloud of blue smoke. He'd choked it too much. He goosed the trigger and the machine reacted fine. He pressed the kill switch. The bar oil was low, so he topped it off. He checked the tension on the chain.

He climbed the ladder carrying a triangular handsaw and trimmed the small branches from the limb where he planned to cut. Some yielded with a single stroke. Others fractured and hung by a strip. These he removed by hitting the strip with the saw blade. All the branches fell with a hiss of sibilant consonants onto the lawn.

Done with the prep work, he descended and inspected the branch from several angles. There wasn't any risk of it hitting either the house or the garage, as long as it fell straight down. He'd have to make a clean cut, for a good fall. If the branch spun or tilted, it might take out a gutter, or a window.

He carried the chainsaw up the ladder and braced a knee against the side rail. Set, he pulled the cord and the engine caught on the second yank.

He made the first cut vertically upward, starting at the bottom of the branch and pushing the saw straight up. Wood sprayed, some of it into his face. He squinted.

He stopped pushing a third of the way into the limb. He pulled the saw back down, keeping the chain going until it was out of the wood. He held the saw away from himself, away from the ladder, while he inspected the cut. Raw wood showed in the slot he'd made, and a strip of bark had torn away on one side, exposing more bare wood. The cut was perfectly vertical.

The limb there, about a third of the way along its length, was six inches in diameter. He made a vertical mark with a brief saw touch, perpendicular to the existing cut, to mark the spot for the downward stroke. He stepped up to the next rung of the ladder, third from the top.

The downward cut was perfect. The end, he saw immediately, was flat, without the angle in the middle where the down and up cuts never matched. The cut section dropped straight down.

The lopped wood had barely begun to fall when the part of the branch still attached to the tree, freed of the weight, rose up. He should have extended the ladder. The ends scraped against the bark as the branch lifted, leaving a pair of tracks. The ladder, with nothing but air under it, fell forward toward the power line.

Wyatt threw the saw to the side and grasped the edges of the ladder with his hands, intending to slide down. He saw that he didn't have time. He should have grabbed for the tree branch as it rose. Too late now. He was grinning at himself: Fool. Always hasty.