4

Pace left before dawn two mornings following his last conversation with Bitsy. He headed his Pathfinder north with New York City as his intended destination. He left a note tacked to the front door of the big house addressed to both Bitsy and Del, informing them of his sudden desire to revisit New York. He wasn’t sure when he’d be back, he’d let them know. Pace took his notebooks with him, planning to continue writing his book about his parents wherever he landed. That was the great thing about being a writer, Pace thought: you could do it anywhere.

If somehow Bitsy had conceived a child fathered by him, Pace did not really want to know. She would certainly tell Del that it was his and they would both be happy. It didn’t matter what Pace felt or thought. He welcomed, even depended on his insignificance in the matter. In the end—or the interim, whatever the case might be—one’s understanding of one’s actions does little or nothing to alter the result. Pace wondered if he had read this somewhere, or was it a product of his own consideration of the circumstances? Perhaps Bitsy was not pregnant—but Pace’s intuition told him that she was. What if he were not Bitsy’s only lover? That was always a possibility. Time to go. He was no longer needed or particularly wanted, and he had work to do.

Pace suddenly remembered one night about ten o’clock when he and Bitsy had been walking together on the path between the cottage and the big house, in which Del was correcting his student’s exams. She turned her head to say something to Pace when he took her right arm firmly with his left hand and said, “stop.” Bitsy had been about to take a step when she looked down and saw a very long water moccasin crawling across the spot on the path where she would have put down her left foot had Pace not held her back. “What a terrible snake,” she said, as they watched its silver and red-diamonded body slither past them. Her foot was still suspended above the ground. “I just saved your life,” Pace said. “Don’t forget it.” She finished her step and they smiled at each other. “Not tonight or ever,” said Bitsy.