FOR AT LEAST three months now, Hilda Cluett had stood to one side of her kitchen window and watched the teacher, Albert May, eat his dinner, either outside on the school steps when the weather was fine or, when it turned cold, she could see him with his feet up on his desk, and it was always the same: Cabot bread, peanut butter and jam, a thermos of tea—amazing, she thought, the detail she could see through the old telescope, though it had to be tipped this way and that when the reflection of the sky shimmered, totally amazing it was; sometimes, believe it or not, even through her lace curtains, she could read his watch for the time of day and see the rise and fall of his breathing, which often seemed synchronous to her own, and all of this, mind you, through this one small telescope—steady now—all brass, left to her thirteen years before when her husband, John Cluett, fell from the deck of his dragger into Halifax Harbour, weighed down by three sweaters, a woolen overcoat, oilskins, heavy boots, a mortgage of three thousand dollars, and a photo in his wallet of Hilda Cluett, then Hilda Hickey, age twenty-one, out at the barasway, squinting into what must have been a high sun, so unguarded she was.