Between the storm door and the front door, the paperboy has placed the evening paper as usual. May be late. M. Gathering all the mail except the envelope from Japan, she shoves it behind the paper and closes the storm door. She gets into her car and drives away. All the way down her block, the leaf piles have been cleared.
Nothing remains except dried-up fragments.
Maya's weaving studio is upstairs from the boutique where she works during the day. The building is a remodeled barn twenty minutes north of the city, in countryside that's as quiet at night as it must have been a century ago. Alone at the loom by the window overlooking the gravel parking lot and the cornfields beyond it, she will think of her father and wonder how she ended up so far away from him, in a landscape he never saw. The silence in the flat stretch of landscape is full of history, but there is no comfort in it for her. When the light changes, she veers across two lanes of traffic to turn left, away from the freeway.