By Wednesday afternoon the big kiln had gone quiet, and Silas had run out of reasons to stay away from the small one.

The main firing had finished at two in the morning. He had sealed the damper, bricked up the stoke hole with a fresh plug of fireclay, and stood a moment in the dark with his palm against the warm arch, the way another man might stand at the door of a sleeping child. Now it would cool for two days, ticking and sighing to itself, and he would not be allowed to open it until it was ready. That was the rule. You could not hurry a kiln any more than you could hurry grief. You put in your work and your wood and your attention, and then you waited, and what came out was what came out.

He had never been good at the waiting part. That was why he kept the little kiln.

It stood at the back of the yard under its own tin roof, a squat, stubby thing his grandfather had built of salvaged firebrick, big enough for a few dozen test tiles and a handful of small pots. It was for experiments. For the glaze he had been chasing since the spring, a deep reduced copper red that wanted to be a gentle oxblood and kept coming out the color of a bruise. He had forty-one failed tiles in a crate under the bench. Today he intended to make it forty-two.

At ten past three, as he was kneeling at the little firebox with a bundle of kindling and a box of matches, a voice behind him said, "Is this all right? Am I in the way?"

He glanced over his shoulder. The young woman standing at the edge of the covered yard had a notebook clutched against her chest like a shield and a canvas bag slung across her body. She had a round, earnest face and short dyed-purple hair, and she was looking at the kiln with the kind of naked hunger most people reserved for puppies.

"Dee," he said. "Right. From the college. You emailed."

"Delphine, officially, but nobody calls me that. I'm so sorry, I know I said Friday, but I got a ride and I thought I'd see if you were around, and then there was smoke, and I" She stopped, drew breath, and visibly ordered herself to behave. "I'm writing my thesis on regional wood-fired ceramics. I know it's a lot to ask. I promise I won't touch anything."

Silas considered the notebook, the bag, the shining eagerness. He was not in the mood for company. He was, however, very much in the mood for something to do with his mouth other than think, and there was no better subject than the one he could talk about in his sleep.

"Come here," he said. "Stand there. Not that close. You'll want to see this from the side."

She came. She stood where he pointed. He struck a match, held it to the curl of birch bark tucked under the kindling, and watched the little flame crawl up the paper and catch. The sticks began to crackle. He fed them one at a time, thin ones first, then thicker, building the structure the way he had been taught, with air gaps between the pieces so the fire could breathe.

"The thing people get wrong," he said, "is thinking it's about the flame."

"Isn't it?"

"No. Flame is just the part that shows off." He sat back on his heels. "It's the coals. Look at the bottom of the box. See that bed of red? That's the heart of it. A good fire isn't something you build, it's something you keep. You lay down your coals, you feed them slowly, and you don't ever let them go out. If the coals die, you've lost the whole firing, and you start over, and a firing is four days."

Dee was writing so fast her pen skidded. "And if there's too much wood on top of them?"

"You smother them. If there's too little, they starve. You have to learn how much a fire wants." He fed a split of oak into the box and it settled onto the bed of embers with a soft sigh. "The first year my father let me near the kiln, I put on too much. Showing off. It choked, and the whole chamber went down a hundred degrees, and he stood there with his arms crossed and said, 'Well. Now you know what it feels like to be too eager.' I never forgot it."

"What do you do when you have to leave it? When you need to sleep?"

"You bank it." He raked the coals toward the back of the box with the iron hook, covered them with a thin layer of ash, and the red glow shrank to a faint, steady eye. "You cover them over so they burn low. They don't look like much. A stranger would think the fire was dead. But under there it's all still alive, just waiting. You come back at dawn, you stir the ash, and there it is." He nodded at the little red eye. "Ready to catch again as if you'd never been gone."

He heard what he had said a moment after he said it.

Dee had stopped writing. She was looking at him with her head a little on one side and her pen suspended in the air.

Silas cleared his throat. "It's a figure of speech. Banking is a figure of speech. It's an actual technique, but also a figure of speech. Ask your next question."

She bent over her notebook, and her ears were pink, and he found that he liked her a good deal.

The kiln worked beside them, ticking as it heated. He rose and checked the draft. He told her about the ash that flew through the chamber in a wood firing and landed on the pots and melted into a glaze nobody had planned, how no two pieces ever came out the same, how the best ones were always the ones the fire had made a decision about. He told her that the cracks were as much a part of it as the colors. She wrote that down in capitals.

He was kneeling again, tucking another split of oak against the glow, when the smell reached him.

It was the smoke. It was only the smoke. Oak, pine kindling, the sweet scorched edge of birch bark curling in the heat. He had smelled it every day of his life. It meant nothing, and it did not matter.

But it came up from the firebox in a long warm curl and drifted out into the yard, and, because the afternoon was still, hung there in the golden air above the low stone wall at the edge of the garden. And Silas was sixteen again.

He was sixteen, and he was feeding the kiln his father had left him to mind on a July evening, and the sun was going down in long red bars through the trees. Someone was sitting on the wall. A boy a year older than he was, narrow and dark-haired, with a cello case propped against the stones and a bored, secret look on his face, like a prisoner who has been let out for an hour and intends to make it count. He had been coming over since June. Nobody had invited him. He just appeared, every day around six, when his father's practice schedule gave out and left a gap.

"You smell like a campfire," the boy had said.

"I work at a kiln."

"No, I mean, you smell like it all the time. Everywhere. Even in the grocery store. I could find you blindfolded."

"That's disgusting."

"It isn't." The boy had picked at the moss between two stones. "It's the best thing I know of. Better than rosin. Don't tell anyone I said so." And then, with a quick, shy grin, the first real one Silas had ever seen from him: "It got into my coat last time. I wore it to rehearsal and my teacher asked if the building was on fire. I said no. I said it was a friend."

Silas had nearly dropped the iron hook into the firebox.

That was all. That was the whole of it. A boy on a wall, a smell on a coat, a sentence he had carried around for sixteen years like a coin in his pocket, worn smooth from handling.

"Mr. Oakhurst?"

He blinked. The yard came back. Dee was watching him with an expression of polite concern, and the smoke was only smoke.

"Sorry," he said. "Lost my place."

"I asked if the clay body changes how the coals behave."

"Does it." He stood, brushed ash from his knees. "Yes. Sort of. It depends on the iron content, and"

The green gate shrieked.

Silas did not turn around. He did not have to. In the span of a single heartbeat, every nerve in his back knew who it was, and the knowledge ran down his spine like a drawn bow. The latch dropped. A shoe scraped on gravel. Dee's eyes went past his shoulder, widened a fraction, and then, very slowly, to him.

"Hello," said a voice behind him. "Sorry. I didn't realize you had a visitor."

He turned.

Lucien stood just inside the gate, holding a flattened cardboard box in both arms like an offering. He had changed his coat. It was a gray work jacket now, a man's jacket, patched at the elbow and unmistakably old. There was dust in his hair and a faint smudge on the point of his cheekbone, as if he had been wrestling with the contents of an attic. He looked tired in the way people look tired when they have stopped noticing it. He looked, Silas thought, as if he had been standing at that gate for some time, working up to it.

"Dee," Silas said, and was pleased with how level it came out, "this is my neighbor. Lucien Marsh. He's clearing out his father's place. Lucien, this is Dee, she's writing a thesis."

"On wood firing," Dee said, and shook Lucien's hand with a firmness that made Lucien blink. Her glance flicked once between the two of them, quick as a sparrow, and she added, with a perfectly bland face, "I'll just be over here. Looking at the kiln." And withdrew to the far corner of the yard, where she proceeded to look at the kiln with an intensity that would have been convincing in a person who was not holding her breath.

Silas folded his arms. "Something you need?"

"Yes. Sorry." Lucien shifted the box. "The dumpster arrives tomorrow, and I've been filling bags all day, and there are a lot of them. I thought if I could borrow something to carry them down the track on, a hand truck, or a wheelbarrow, even, I could stage them at the gate and save the driver the trouble. If it's no problem. If you have one."

It was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. It was the sort of thing a neighbor asked a neighbor. Silas looked at the cardboard in Lucien's arms, and at the long fingers curled around its edge, and saw that they were not entirely still.

"There's a trolley in the back shed," he said. "I'll fetch it."

"I can get it."

"It sticks." He was already moving. "You wouldn't know which way to push."

He was aware, walking, that Lucien had fallen into step beside him. He was aware that neither of them said anything. The path to the back shed ran along the east fence, a strip of packed dirt no wider than a man's two shoulders, with the stacked oak on one side and the wall on the other. It had been built for one person. It had always been a path for one. Walking it with two, Silas felt the air between their arms take on weight, until every few steps their sleeves brushed, a whisper of canvas on denim, and each time it happened something in his chest went up like dry kindling.

He lengthened his stride. Lucien matched it. Neither of them acknowledged this.

The shed door stuck. It always did. He put his shoulder into it, once, the way you would to a stubborn animal, and it gave with a groan, and there was the trolley, red paint gone to rust, hanging on its hook. He lifted it down. Lucien reached for the other handle at the same moment, and their hands met on the cold steel.

It was only a second. Lucien's fingers were icy. Silas's were warm from the kiln. Neither of them pulled away at once, and the stillness between them, in the dim of the shed with the dust turning in the slanted light, was something Silas could feel along every nerve of his arm.

Then Lucien let go. "Sorry," he said again, very quietly.

"You say that a lot."

"I know."

Silas wheeled the trolley out into the light.

They pushed it together back along the fence, one on each side, steering it between the woodstack and the wall. The wheels bumped over roots. At the little firebox Lucien stopped, so abruptly that the trolley jolted and Silas had to catch it.

"What is it?"

But Lucien was not looking at him. He was looking at the kiln. At the little stubby fire in its brick box, where the oak was settling into a bed of deep gold embers, and the flames lifted off it in a slow, clean rustle. He was standing perfectly still, with the particular absorption of a man listening to something in another room. The late sun lit one side of his face. It was thinner than it should have been. Silas could see the tendon in his neck move as he swallowed.

"This fire's different," Lucien said at last. "From the old days. It's a different color."

"It's a different wood. Oak, not pine. Pine burns fast, it's greedy. It was cheaper, back then." Silas took a breath. "Everything's different, Lucien. Everything is different after nine years."

He had not meant it to come out like that. It came out like a stone dropped into a still pond, and he watched the rings of it go out across Lucien's face. No flinch this time. No shutter. Only a kind of quiet receiving, as if Lucien had been standing in the rain waiting for it, and had decided, finally, not to duck.

"Yes," he said. "I know. I'm learning that."

The fire popped. Across the yard Dee, who had been looking at the kiln with all her might, went suddenly rigid.

Neither of them spoke. It was not the stiff, polite silence of the doorway on Tuesday. This one was heavier and a good deal more honest. It had the weight of two people standing on opposite banks of the same wide water, each looking at the same fire, and each knowing the other was looking too. The embers glowed. The air above the firebox rippled with heat. Silas watched a bright coal break open and release a little gasp of sparks, and thought, with perfect clarity: I could say it. I could say, I waited a year. I could say, I left the porch light on until the bulb burned out. The words were right there. They were in his mouth like stones.

He said, "The handle on the left side loosens. You have to tighten it every few trips."

Lucien looked at him. Something moved behind the gray-green eyes, and for a moment Silas thought he would say something, and for a moment he wanted him to.

"Thank you," Lucien said. "I will."

He took the handles. He wheeled the trolley away along the fence with his shoulders held very straight, past the stacked oak, past the shed, to the gate in the wall. The latch shrieked. The gate groaned. The latch dropped. And Silas stood alone beside the little fire with his arms still folded and his pulse thundering in his ears, absurdly breathless, as if he had run a mile.

"Mr. Oakhurst?" Dee's voice was very small. "Would you like me to come back Friday?"

"Yes," he said. "Please. Friday."

"Okay." She gathered her notebook. She was halfway to the road before she turned back and said, with great seriousness, "For what it's worth, I think the figure of speech is a really good technique," and fled.

Silas laughed. He had not intended to. It came out of him short and cracked and not very amused, and after it he stood a while with his hand pressed over his mouth.

The afternoon went on. He worked. The little kiln came up to heat, and he fed it, and checked the draft, and made his forty-second failure with great care and attention. Around five he found he had been standing for several minutes with a test tile in his hand, looking at nothing, and he put it down and went to wash.

He remembered the way Lucien stood. That was the trouble. He could have forgotten a great many things. The sound of his voice, even, had become a hum in the back of his mind, blurred like a song heard through a wall. But the way he stood, the weight on the left foot, the shoulder tipped slightly forward, the head bent to listen, as though every sound in the world was a sentence in a language he was determined to learn, that he remembered so exactly it was almost a physical pain. It was there in every muscle of his own body, like a limb he had amputated and still felt.

He hated it. He hated that his body kept the record when his mind had finally, sensibly, let go.

At dusk the sky over the river went the color of a peach. The air sharpened. He stood at the workshop door with a mug of tea going cold in his hands, and looked across at the Marsh house, where a single window on the ground floor was lit and nothing else. A man alone in a house of too many rooms. A man who had said, I could hear the kiln last night, as though it were a confession.

The nights were cold now. It would be colder tonight than it had been. Silas knew, because he knew this valley as he knew the lines on his own palm, that the old house had a wood stove in the front room that nobody had lit in eleven years, and that the furnace, which he had serviced himself a month ago, would only just keep the chill at bay.

He did not decide anything. He would have said, if you had asked him, that he did not decide.

He took a small clay firepot from the shelf, a thick-walled bowl he had thrown for a customer who had never collected it. He carried it to the little kiln, opened the door a hand's breadth, and with the iron shovel lifted a bed of deep gold coals into it. He covered them gently with a thin layer of ash. They glowed up through it like a held breath. He carried the whole thing out to the stone wall, to the place near the green gate where the top of the wall was broad and flat, and he set it down there, on the Marsh side of the stones, in the open.

He did not leave a note. He did not knock.

He stood a moment with his hands on the cold rough rock, looking at the faint red eye of the coals, and the thin ribbon of smoke rising straight up into the dusk. Then he turned around and went back to his own side of the wall, and shut the gate, and did not look at the window.

He looked at it four times before he went to bed.