Together they sang, “ ‘Hit the road and I’m gone ... What’s my number? I wonder how your engine feels.’ ”
At the Sugar Shack the afternoon breeze turned cool. Tony unloaded the last of the branches, drained the scant few gallons of liquid from the sap tank. Linda kept him at bay. Again he felt her rejection, revulsion. Again he saw how deserving he was of that rejection.
“Babe,” Linda said tentatively. How hard it was for her to speak the words. “Do you want to come home?”
Tony looked at her, his eyes locked on hers, not with intensity but in pain. How he wanted to say yes. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
For Tony things became more complicated. Bobby had asked him to talk to Adolph Lutz about the aquifer and to tell him that Tony would plant the lower thirty-six acres this year. Tony had ag
