At Brattleboro, he turned off the highway, rented a motel room, and walked into town. He found a brew pub where he sat at a corner table with a pint of ruby brown ale--cool and fresh, the malt veiled with lacy astringent hops. He had another and watched the bartender talk on the telephone, her elbows and breasts on the bar, a vertical worry line dropping between her eyes. She was about his daughter Kate's age. The room began to fill, the nasal sound of New York mixing with flat New England tones. The Connecticut River valley narrows in Brattleboro, a gateway to upper New England for New Yorkers. He was going through in the other direction, trying to figure out what to do next. What do you do at 52 when the kids are grown? The same things all over again? He took out a notebook and remembered the drive--the blue sky, the red and gold ridges, small fields tilting greenly in their arms. On such a day, one could almost be forgiven, he wrote. A blonde woman with a wry smile, an experienced charmer, sat down at the next table. He considered having another ale, making friends with her and starting a new life in Brattleboro or over the mountain in Bennington, but he knew that he was fooling himself. It was too familiar; he might as well have stayed in Maine. "Gotta go," he said to her sadly. She raised her eyebrows, acknowledging the human condition, and he walked back to the motel. At the edge of town, trees were dark behind a body of water that was platinum and still. Fish broke the surface with soft slaps in the centers of expanding circles. Ansel Adams might have caught the many shades of silver just before the lights went out. The next afternoon Joe was across the Hudson, driving through the mountains on roads that were more crowded than he remembered. There were many new houses and the trees were larger. He stopped on the hill by his grandparents' old house in Woodstock. Captain Ben had retired during the depression to that rocky hillside and made a homely paradise of gardens and fruit trees. A slow silent job. Emily was beside him, canning, cooking, and mothering. They said you couldn't grow pears around there. We ate a lot of pears, Joe thought. And plums, apples, rhubarb, strawberries, asparagus . . . The house smelled of geraniums from the solar greenhouse that his grandfather built onto the dining room long before anyone ever heard of a solar greenhouse.