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go back to the place, deal with it face to face. A couple days, maybe, is all I’ll need… but I have to. I’m sorry.”
    “Hon,” Susan began, striking a note that gently urged they get to the heart of their feelings. This was a flashpoint between them. How angry Karen had let it make her in their earlier days. But Karen had learned since then how wrong an angry answer was. “You’ve got to forgive me, Karen. I’ve got to say this. Will you let me?”
    “Sure. It’s nice just hearing your voice.”
    “You shouldn’t do this alone! Move back in there alone! You don’t need to. Please let me be there with you and help you through it. You were defenseless when you lived it; now you have an ally.”
    Karen imagined it: she and Susan bedding down together in the dark of that house, Susan’s lovemaking voice singing out in the silence of those rooms, those halls.
    “Sue, if I can’t do this alone, it’s not facing him. Not by our rules. And he’ll never leave me then. He’ll just keep eating me hollow. But maybe, after just a little while, maybe things will look different… . “Thinking to herself that maybe even this was too much to be yielding and with half her heart whining Yes! Be with me. I can’t go in there alone!
    “ Your rules? His and yours?”
    “Don’t ask me to make sense, Sue. It’s just that to face it I have to relive it and I lived it alone. Mom just refused to know.”
    “… You’ll call me tomorrow when you get there?”
    “Tomorrow afternoon, yes. Tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night.” She might not be up to talking to Sue right away. She was damned sure going to arrive there in broad daylight, though.
    And she did. It was in the blaze of noon that her tires sizzled up the gravel drive again. And, amazingly to her, she was bone-sober. She took her foot from the gas and let the truck coast to a stop, confronting the house once more. Sitting bemused, Karen was amazed by what she had just accomplished. Waking before sunrise, she’d jumped out of bed, peed, washed, and changed, flung her things in the duffel, the duffel into the truck and roared onto the freeway.
    It was whoosh all the way. An off-ramp down to a liquor store just ahead? Whoosh . It sank behind in a blur. Pure onrush had kept her panic bottled. ( You can’t go there sober! You can’t go in there with your mind naked!) But now here she was, sober in fact.
    What had she done? Had she lost her mind?
    Momentum. It was her only hope. She flung her door open and surged from the truck. Jumped up those steps (worn round-edged by the years) up into the Stonehenge shadow of the massive porch roof, her key already out. She stabbed it into the lock like a dagger, shouldered open the heavy-boned door, and plunged into the dimness where armchairs, armoires, tables, door-frames, crowded her eyes with their ancient, intimate anatomies, sending through her a ghostly rout of childhood days and nights.
    All urgency vanished. She stood there accepting what had dawned on her yesterday: that she had already been living here all along, had never lived anywhere else. All the fear and pain and ancient sweetness that breathed from every door and wall and chair around her now, had been the air she breathed every day of her life.
    Moving slowly, she began to engage the place. Downstairs first. She pulled back the curtains, opened all the blinds and windows. Checked the closets, meeting in the hall closet a twelve-gauge shotgun propped in one corner, not surprised that Dad would have more than one, as the police must have the one he’d used on himself.
    The kitchen, its sunny utility porch… . These were Mom’s domain and brought Karen warmer memories. Her big stainless steel sink was on the porch in her canning nook with its worktable and shelves of jars that breathed out an aura of luscious jams and jellies. And here by the pantry door was her chopping table, its whole top a heavy cutting board which whispered a breath of tomatoes and