Spencerville

Keith had given some thought to driving to Bowling Green. What better place to run into each other? But she said she'd stop by when she returned. And there was still the possibility that Cliff Baxter had gone with her, to keep an eye on her and to be certain she was miserable while showing their daughter around the town and university. Keith could only imagine what kind of discussions had taken place in the Baxter house when Wendy Baxter announced she'd applied to and been accepted by her mother's alma mater.

Keith understood, too, that now with both son and daughter away at school, Annie Baxter had to do some thinking. Annie had hinted as much in one of her recent letters, but referred only to "making some decisions about finishing my doctorate, or getting a full-time paying job, or doing things I've been putting off too long."

Maybe, Keith thought, there was some preordained destiny at work, as Pastor Wilkes had preached, and life was not the chaos it seemed. After all, hadn't Keith Landry's arrival in Spencerville coincided with Annie Baxter's newly empty nest? But this confluence of events was not totally serendipitous; Keith knew from Annie's letters that Wendy was going away to college, which may have subconsciously influenced his decision to return. On the other hand, his forced retirement could have occurred two or three years ago, or two or three years from now. But more important, he was ready to change his life, and, by the tone of her recent letters, she was long overdue. So coincidence, subconscious planning, or miracle? No doubt a little of each.

He was torn between action and inaction, between waiting and doing. His Army training had taught him to act, his intelligence training had taught him patience. "There is a time to sow and a time to reap," said his Sunday school teacher. One of his intelligence school instructors had added, "Miss either of those times and you're fucked."

"Amen."

Keith finished the last faucet and paused to wash his hands in the kitchen sink.

He'd accepted an invitation to attend a Labor Day barbecue at his Aunt Betty's house a few miles away. The weather had been good, the steaks were terrific, the salads were all homemade, and the sweet corn, which ripened long before the field corn, was fresh off the stalk.

About twenty people had shown up, and Keith knew most of them or knew of them. Men his own age, not yet fifty, looked old, and this gave him a scare. There were a good number of kids there, too, and the teenage boys seemed interested in his having lived in Washington, and they all wanted to know if he'd ever been to New York. His years of living in Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, and elsewhere in the world were so far removed from their frame of reference that no one seemed curious about those places. Regarding his job, most everyone had heard his parents say that Keith was in the diplomatic corps. Not everyone understood precisely what this meant, but neither would they have understood his last job with the National Security Council; in truth, after over twenty years with Army Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the NSC, Keith himself understood less of his job description with each transfer and promotion. When he'd been an operative, a spy, it was all crystal-clear. Further up the ladder, it got foggy. He'd sat at White House conferences with people from the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Net Assessments Group, the National Security Agency — not to be confused with the National Security Council — and ten other intelligence groups, including his former employers, the Defense Intelligence Agency. In the world of intelligence, overlap equaled maximum security. How could fifteen or twenty different agencies and subagencies completely miss something important? Easy.

The waters may have been muddy in the 1970s and '80s, but at least they were all running in the same direction. After about 1990, things got not only muddier but stagnant. Keith supposed that he'd been saved about five years of confused embarrassment. His last assignment had been on a committee that was seriously considering implementing a secret pension plan for former high-ranking KGB officials. One of his colleagues described it as "a sort of Marshall Plan for our former enemies." Only in America.

Anyway, the Labor Day barbecue ended with a twilight baseball game on a jerry-built diamond in Aunt Betty's yard. Keith had a better time than he thought he would.

The only real awkwardness was as a result of the presence of three unattached women: a third cousin, Sally, unmarried at thirty years old and a hundred and seventy pounds or so, but sweet, and two divorced women, Jenny, with two children, and the unfortunately named Anne, no children, both in their late thirties, both nice-looking. He had the distinct impression they weren't there for the homemade salads.