And then there was the meadow.
He set the cup down. He did not want to think about the meadow either. He was running out of things he did not want to think about, he noticed, and the morning was not half done.
Fly came and lay down on the linoleum by the stove with her chin on his left foot. He felt her breathing through his sock.
"What is it?" he said to her. "Hm? What's got into you?"
She lifted her eyes to him without lifting her head. One brown eye, one that was brown with a fleck of blue in it, a thing collies sometimes have. Ilse had called it her sky eye.
The phone rang. Two longs and a short, which was his ring. The Tolstad place was still on a party line in 1985, one of the last in the county; there were five households on it, strung out along eleven miles of the Mullen road, and Lafe Ostermann at the feed store liked to say that the Sandhills Telephone Cooperative was the only outfit in Nebraska that still provided a free newspaper with every phone. Arne picked it up off the wall and waited for the click of someone else picking up, and heard it, and sighed.
"Dad?"
"Kirsten." He sat down. He did not mean to sit down; his knee did it for him. "It's six-thirty in the morning."
"I'm on nights. I'm just getting off." His daughter was a nurse at Good Samaritan in Kearney, a hundred and seventy miles to the southeast, and she had been on nights for eight months, and she said it as though it explained everything, and it did. "They're saying on the TV it's going to be a bad one up there."