The winter when Connie was 47 (and Megan 12 and Bill 53) was a harsh one. They had almost twice the normal rainfall, and high winds. There were more power outages that season than in any of the ten years since the family moved to northern California. Connie temporarily crippled herself. And coincidentally met Cafeen. The two events together made it Connie’s best winter.

There was one particularly brutal Wednesday night. The wind howled, the rain pelted, and by 8 p.m. the lights were flickering. They lost electricity on and off for a couple of hours, and gave it up at 10. Connie plodded to her room with her head full of thoughts about her diet and the next day’s interviews. Try as she often did not to rate her day, it was always convenient to fall into her habit of judgment, and the monosyllables felt blunt and honest. She had a good day, or she had a bad day. Most of the days were bad. She was bad. She ate too many sweets. She tried forbidding and she rebelled. She tried limiting and she exceeded. Licorice. Candy corn. Spice drops. She was bad. She walked to her room slumped as usual, her uncolored hair hanging in lank sugar-and-chocolate waves by her cheeks, as she mapped out a morning of interviews for the morrow, and pictured her plate at the management luncheon afterwards.

Bill went to his room not tired enough for sleep. He had a business trip the next morning and he was nervous about it; he almost reached for the comfort of his magazines. He briefly considered a conjugal visit but his body remained quiescent, and he remained in his room.

Megan was the only one of the three of them who went immediately to sleep. She wasn’t particularly tired, and the storm noise freaked her out a little, but with nothing to do she soon inadvertently meditated, and slipped from trance to sleep.

Two trees came down that night in their neighborhood, but no houses were damaged. One big oak sprawled like a giant broccoli stalk across their normally busy street, and Public Works diverted traffic all morning. Everyone was a little edgy with excitement, Connie chatting and Bill not, Megan alternating between eager child and blasé pre-teen. Connie’s voice made Bill so irritable that he left on his trip without checking the house over, and Bill’s sulkiness made Connie not ask. When she ran out of hot water in the shower after he left, she went to the basement herself to determine the problem. She was reviewing her day’s menu intentions, so she didn’t realize that the sump pump had failed until she slipped in the slimy flood and wrenched her left knee a quarter way around.

She went to work anyway. Most people would have recognized the inevitability of recuperation and elevated that swelling knee at home, but Connie didn’t think once about altering her day’s plan. She just moved more slowly, less gracefully, into the rain and wind, and by the time she got to work she looked 60 and felt 80.