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of that tuna fish or whatever it is you live on.”
    Dinner was pot roast, potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. Mary Varney piled it on a plate and put it in front of me at the table, then swooped back with another plate that was stacked with warm cornbread. I sat there feeling sheepish, as I always did when she waited on me, and she came back with a tall glass of milk.
    Clair Varney had the same.
    â€œHe’s been eating tuna fish again, Mum,” he said.
    â€œJack McMorrow,” Mary said, “I’ve told you. You don’t know where that stuff has been.”
    â€œOnly place to eat out of a can is a foxhole,” her husband said, buttering his cornbread. “And then only when you can’t find something better.”
    â€œI was reading in the paper this morning,” Mary said, sitting down across from me to a miniature version of my meal. “The obituaries. Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. You know it’s got to be because of the air we breathe. The water we drink. The food we eat. Our bodies get filled with chemicals. The other day I was at the checkout at Bud’s over in Unity and this man in front of me has all this stuff. Ugh. This blue cereal. Diet soda, which is all chemicals. Artificial this and artificial that. It took everything I had not to say something.”
    â€œThere’s a first,” Clair said.
    â€œOh, hush,” she said.
    â€œYou’re right,” I said. “Look at the label on just about anything and it looks like they took all the cans out from under the kitchen sink and just dumped it in.”
    â€œAnd people gobble it all up,” Mary said.
    â€œI swear that’s what’s wrong with this country,” Clair said. “Productivity. GNP and all that. Most of the people in this country are working at half energy. Drones, you know?”
    Mary Varney ate a couple of bites and went back to the stove, where she was boiling canning jars in a big kettle. She bent over to pull another pan out of the cupboard and her shirt rode up above her jeans, exposing five or six inches of smooth muscular back. For Clair’s sake, I tried not to look, but still I could picture her. More of her than her back, I mean.
    She was a handsome woman, small and strong with blonde-silver hair pulled straight back, and, I thought, a perfect match for Clair. They could have been in ads for vitamins or self-help books: the good-looking fiftyish couple who give the rest of us hope. Fit. Capable. Productive. Content with their lot in life.
    We were an odd threesome.
    I’d thought this before and I thought it again as I sat there eating the beef from their steer, the vegetables from their garden. Mary was pulling the jars out of the steaming water with a pair of tongs. Clair got up to put an orange cat out the back door. There was a calendar on the wall to my right, one from the auto parts store in Unity. Somebody had torn off the picture of the girl and Mary had made notes for each day. “Can paste tomatoes.” “Henry to vet’s.” “Pick last cukes.”
    If I had a calendar, and I didn’t, it would show the day and the date.
    Period.
    We were so different, and yet they’d befriended me almost from the time I’d moved in, just down the road. It had been February, cold and wet, and I’d been tinkering with my old Volvo, which hadconked out at the end of the driveway, when Clair had come by in his majestic red four-wheel-drive Ford pickup. Looking up at him in the driver’s seat, I felt my testosterone level plummet.
    Clair had asked what the problem was, as if I had a clue. I had told him what I knew, which was that it wouldn’t start. He had looked down at me benevolently, then, without another word, had pulled his truck up a few feet and then back to the Volvo. Climbing down from the cab, Varney had pulled a tow chain out from behind the seat, hooked it to the car’s front axle. Without saying more than a