We couldn’t have known what would happen that night, read the future in the flour grains on her table. But it’s been years since April 26 of 1848, so many years, and when I think about what I ought to have done differently, among all my great errors I nevertheless remember that wave, and that I ought to have kissed her before the gentle creak of the door and the thud of my boots in the dirt marked my departure from what had been – for all its many singular silences – a happy home.
