one

Drive down in the dark, in the fog—thick white against the headlights and the windshield. The world without form and without shape. Follow the sound of gravel grinding under tires as it slips and shifts. Smooth and quiet means you’re headed into the ditch. Cross over metal pipes, the thump-thump-thump of the cattle guard. Downhill, into the bottomland, the gritty crunch now covered by the bawling of frogs and cicadas. Stop the car. Wait. The sun will rise and burn the land into relief.

When morning comes, the view is a tangle of trees and underbrush—bur oak and cedar elm, pecan and supplejack, poison oak and mustang grape vines. Not a hiking forest but scratchy impenetrability, like a ten-acre fence gapped only by this dirt road. Cow pastures lie somewhere near, in this border between oak savannahs and Gulf prairies, but here is just a small clearing with a large white house guarded by a sextet of cottonwoods. Wind lifts the cotton from the trees, and it snows down on the house: two stories with four large columns careening up the front, broken in the middle by a spindle railing and balcony. Windows peep from the gabled roof. Bermuda grass covers the lawn, interrupted by square flowerbeds lined out with railroad ties—the smell of roses and creosote.

The house is bounded by the woods on one side and the Brazos River, slow moving and brown, on the other. The fluff from a cottonwood lands, rides a mud-saturated current, and then gets sucked under. The rise and fall of the water level has left the clay banks patched with only fast-growing weeds. The river—not Mississippi-wide, but too wide to throw a stone across—generates a steady white noise.

And inside the house? Peter and June in their bed, old and brass, columned like their home. The brass rises like prison bars from the head and the foot of the frame. The bed sat forgotten in his parents’ barn for decades until Peter found it. He was eleven months into dating June, and he jokingly said to her the bed, with its feeling of enclosure, spoke to him of marriage. He dragged it to his own place, polished and polished until he had a heap of rags stained with the green that had eaten the brass. Knowing he’d never want to undertake that task again, he shellacked the whole damn thing to keep it from tarnishing. It worked for a long time, past the births of all three of their children. But as the years passed, the tarnish crept back, and now it is the tarnish being protected by the coating. June still likes it. Or she likes Peter’s frustration whenever he stares at it too long.

June and Peter in a bed too small for him. Stretched out, he must either cram an inch of his head between the bars of the headboard, point his toes through the bars at the foot of the bed, or bend his knees. Peter’s a big man, nearly six and a half feet. Wide, too. June has never seen a man so wide and yet not fat. When they were newly married, she straddled him and lay her palm at the edge of one nipple, then her other palm, crossing over and over again. Five hands between, an expanse of a man. Even now that his belly grows soft and extends farther out and down—another two pounds every year—nothing can dwarf that chest.

Or perhaps this should be a study in contrasts, the before and after. Flat stomach to non-flat. His hair, always curly, turned from fat rings of black to ones of gray. The beard fading to white, only black above the lip. Green eyes, sharp and hard as always. Really, he has not changed so much. A partial softening, a partial lightening. June also hasn’t changed much, at least if viewed while sleeping. Her blond hair still the same shade at fifty-five as it was at...