Renee tries not to recall that January night nine years ago, but she is determined to remember her life, so the scene replays in her. That was when she sent her husband away from home and family, into the cold rain with hot tears on his cheeks. She can see Doug forever, mouth twisted in an ugly grimace as the reluctant tears brimmed from his pale eyes. Grief displaced anger in him; he was too wounded then to hate her. He shrug-stiffened his shoulders as he turned away, and the rain made seeping circles on the yoke of his blue shirt as he walked, stooped slightly forward, down the front steps.

She’s sorry. Doug had been her best friend before marriage. He’s the father of her twins. He’s a good man. Renee is sorry every time she recollects that going.

This afternoon the memory is triggered by a simple weather forecast. The kids are trying to make a kite, from scratch, planning to fly it in the schoolyard wind three blocks away. Both the radio and the sky forebode. Renee passes into the kitchen with the idea of rain in her mind, and sees their father in the faces of her children. Eleven years old now, the twins have lost enough baby fat that their cheekbones have taken on Doug’s edge, and their noses have arched from buttons to bows. Renee sees and regrets. She doesn’t wish to be married again to Doug, but she hates the memory of sending him crying into the cold rain.

The twins are making their kite the hard way. They found crumpled tissue paper in old shoeboxes and flattened it as well as they could. They built a frame of wooden strips and string, prepared a tail of knotted rags. Now they are cooking flour and water to make paste. They plan to glue the tissue paper to itself around the string frame, and they need a paste that’s thin and smooth. Jake and Janie are both trying the stir the stuff, wooden spoons clunking like miniature oars.

The flour cannister sits open on the counter. Renee almost tells the twins to cover it and push it back into its place. Just before she speaks she feels a strong impulse arise in her. She wants to make bread. She has the ingredients of course. She has the time.

So she sets yeast to feast on warm water and scant sugar. She measures flour into the big metal bowl. She never sifts; she’s a post-war suburban baby and she doesn’t believe in vermin. She fists a well in the flour as if she were making challah, just because the flour feels cool and satiny against her knuckles, and she pours some water and the foaming yeast into the well.

She mixes the dough with her right hand. She learned long ago that it makes no sense to engoop both hands when one will serve the purpose, and there’s no point in messing up a spoon. She pulls the dough through her fingers and into an irregular lump in the middle of the bowl.

She flours the wooden board now, and plops the dough onto it. A small cloud rises around it. As the twins decide their glue is ready and take it off the flame, Renee begins to knead: heel pushing in, fingers curving around the dough and pulling it back toward her, hand poised above for a moment and then heel plunging in again. Renee is not a meditative person, but she always thinks about her body heat as she kneads. She visualizes her warmth entering the flour-and-water mess to release gluten, blending glue into food. That’s magic, she always thinks. Alchemy.

“Ey-yhunh!” Jake grunts unpronounceable anger. Renee looks at him over her shoulder, right fist in dough on the board, and sees that the kite isn’t taking the glue well. Wasn’t taking the glue well. The tissue paper is torn from Jake’s fury. He starts to fling his arms with exasperation but Janie as usual stops him. “We never shoulda tried tissue, Jake,” she says, and he scowls but attends her. “The book says newspaper.” Janie’s favorite book is a biography of Clara Barton. She’s read it at least twice a year since she was seven. She doesn’t care much about Barton as an adult, founder of the American Red Cross. But Jane loves the stories of little Clara’s rural childhood: homemade kites, ice-skating on a neighbor’s pond, horses for everyone. “It’s practically the right shape without cutting,” she says as she fetches a section of the paper and brings it to the table.

An-ger. An-ger. The syllables pound through Renee’s mind in time with the heel of her palm into dough. Did Jake inherit his temper from Doug? or learn it? Unwillingly she recalls her son pulling at his own face, in frustration about something, at the age of two or three. If she hadn’t kept his nails short he would have torn his sweet baby cheeks. She never understood that. Or the way he so often arched his body away from her in his infancy; that scary almost-startle reflex that carried his head back, chin up.

Did that mean he was born angry? Or was that something else, and does the anger come from Doug’s brutality?

Renee did all the right things when she discovered (witnessed) Doug had been hitting Jake, wrenching him, imprisoning him in a dark room. She spoke firmly to Doug and reassuringly to Jake. She offered to call the cops. She didn’t let Jake or Janie spend another night with their father until they and she felt sure they would be safe. But she still feels a bit of shame that she hadn’t anticipated the problem. After all, she’s known Doug since high school.

She thought he was chivalrous, protective, and friendly then, when he pushed the boys’ Vice Principal who tried to stop Renee from leaving school to attend a protest march. And she thought he was maybe excessive but mostly appropriate, when they were bike commuting to their first jobs after college, and Doug tore the mirror off the van of a driver who had rudely, startlingly, honked his horn at Renee.

She realized there was something wrong with Doug’s anger when he spanked the neighborhood kid. They’d been married about two years, and had just bought their house. It had a picket fence around its small front yard, but the pickets were put on backwards, inside the frame, so energetic boys could karate kick at them as they passed by, either knocking them inward or breaking them. The vandalism frustrated them both (especially since the pickets were odd-sized and hard to replace), but Doug let Renee’s irritation fuel his own, so he lost it when he caught the little boy. The kid couldn’t have been more than eight, and he probably wasn’t the only neighborhood mini-vandal, but Doug turned that child over his knee and starting spanking his bottom with the broken picket. Renee had to stop him. That event blew her away. Looking back on it, she realizes that was when she began to stop loving him. Slowly. She stayed with him another five years.

She oils the ball of dough and puts it back in the bowl. She pulls out the other cutting board and places the bowl on it, towel-covered, where it will catch some of the heat from the floor vent. She looks at her now-quiet twins. They’ve about finished the newspaper kite, and it isn’t bad.

Renee washes the dough from between her fingers and walks over to them drying her hands. “You guys want some help with that?” They tell her no, eager to get outside with their kite, willing to wear their jackets in the November chill, jealous of the leaves riding the wind. But they let her tie the rag tail on their kite, and they let her kiss them before they barrel out the door.

Renee smiles at their backs and then frowns at the clouds. The sky has lowered while the kite was made; it looks to her like the kids won’t have much flight time before the rain starts.

Her thoughts return to Doug as she begins to clean the wooden board. She didn’t sprinkle enough flour on it – she never does – so thin ribbons of gummy dough cling to the old wood in half a dozen spots. She pulls the board out of its slot above her kitchen drawers, carries it to the sink, and begins scraping at the dough with a sink rag, under a trickle of warm water.

It’s funny, she thinks, but even after the picket incident, she didn’t worry about Doug being violent. Even when he hit her…

She told herself then that she had provoked him. And she had. They were having one of their awful arguments, he started to walk out, she tried to stop him (with a fistful of the back of his shirt), and he swung around, open-handed, and struck her across the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t a punch. It was a slap. (But it was hard enough to make the blood pour from her nose, and the internal jar gave her a black eye for three weeks.)

And even with all of that, she was surprised four years ago when she watched Doug lash out at Jake with impulsive anger. Because Doug doesn’t seem like a violent man. He is the last guy anyone would call angry.

Doug’s parents hadn’t hit him. He did well in school and he always had at least one friend. He wasn’t a jock but he was six feet tall, fit, and active. He didn’t even experience the ickiness of an older deviant male in his neighborhood to teach him about ejaculation. If everyone has a weird sexual experience, Doug’s was to be initiated into the mysteries at the tender age of fourteen, by a wise old sixteen year old with a healthy attitude. So what, Renee, wonders, does he have to be angry about?

She has just finished cleaning the cutting board when she notices the pot the kids used to make their paste. The unused glue has cooled into a semi-solid mess in the bottom of the saucepan. She runs warm water into it, squirts in some dishwashing liquid. She rubs at the paste with the sink rag.

She tries to imagine what it would be like to still be married to Doug. She can’t. She couldn’t have gotten enough space. Doug suffocated her; he was so into them as a couple. “We think… We want… We feel…” That kind of speech gave her the creeps. He blew kisses at her all the time, said “I love you” a dozen times a day. When he spoke in company, he only looked at her. She hated it.

And he, sensing her hating it, became more uxorious, more tip-toey. And of course more angry?

She rinses the saucepan and refills it with soapy water. A clump of shiny bubbles skates on the surface. The wind kicks up and flings the first fat drops of rain against her kitchen window.

The fact is, Doug survived the expulsion. He lived to learn the deeper meaning of loss, when he buried first his brother and then his parents, and he lived to mate again, to a woman who wanted uxoriousness.

Renee spots her children through the splattered window. Something has made them happy; they’re running toward the house with the kite between them, laughing mouths open to the rain. She can almost see the rain drops shining like soap bubbles on their blue jackets. She glances at the metal bowl of bread dough as she walks to open the door.