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A house in Dallas, Texas. A man is turning eighty this morning, and the first thing he will do about it, before the phone starts ringing with children and grandchildren, is pour two cups of coffee and carry one of them to a woman who is already awake.

They grew up seven blocks apart in Midland and did not meet until they were thirty-one, at a backyard barbecue neither of them wanted to attend. They were engaged within three months.

A schoolteacher who read her way through childhood, and a restless man who had not yet found the shape of his life. She did not remake him. She simply declined to pretend, and he turned out to be someone who needed that more than he needed agreement.