Eileen Bertrud was the sort of girl who told boys they were handsome when they were not. She married Jeremiah Brundage, a boy who returned absurd compliments by topping them. They lived for thirty years in New York City.

After Mr. Brundage’s retirement, they moved upstate to a subdivision with city access via the Port Jervis Line. They had done well to get there. For this, Mrs. Brundage sometimes was ashamed. More often, she enjoyed their property, particularly a sitting room that held a leather chair, his, and a love seat, hers. There were bookcases filled with magazines and an encyclopedia. Mrs. Brundage had mounted a red mandolin on one wall. Her husband never questioned this, but a mandolin would not have been his choice. On either side of the instrument were framed wax-paper artworks by their granddaughter. The loveseat was nearer the window than was the chair. Outside, a dogwood blossomed in spring and relapsed into barrenness by late autumn. Now it was bare. It held a birdfeeder neglected by Mrs. Brundage and, in turn, birds. For weeks, a plastic bag had been caught through its handles by a thin, high branch. When the window lay open and wind blew from the Delaware and Neversink rivers, they heard the bag catch and pop.

Today, Mrs. Brundage noticed not hearing it.

“Jerry,” she said.

Mr. Brundage glanced up from his magazine.

“Is the window open?” she asked.

It was. His wife asked whether he heard the bag.

“No,” he said.

Mrs. Brundage looked out the window. Mr. Brundage returned to his magazine. Mrs. Brundage informed her husband the bag was gone. He nodded, yet read on in a magazine fixated upon sensational aspects of reputable science. In this edition, an author speculated about an earth strike by a killer comet, a massive exaggeration, pointless fuel to reader fears. Mr. Brundage read intently.

“It’s gone, Jerry,” she said.

“The handles broke,” he surmised.

“Or children might have climbed the tree and gotten it,” she suggested.

Skeptically, Mr. Brundage looked up.

“Perhaps they climbed up and got it,” she said.

“Why would they bother?” he asked.

“Jerry, Children do things without the why,” she said. “They enjoy silly things. Plastic bags caught in branches.”

Mr. Brundage held the magazine at his chest.

“The wind,” he concluded. He took up the magazine. The chance of an earth strike by a killer comet was not as small as a reader expects. It was within the realm of hope.

Mrs. Brundage looked at the birdfeeder. “They must have climbed up and seen it and taken it down. They must have come in the morning, Jerry. We were curled up in bed. Or we weren’t in the sitting room but in the kitchen.”

“It isn’t a tree you climb,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “While we were at breakfast.”

“It isn’t, Leenie.”

“Jerry, you’ll recall how I climbed it the day we moved in. I climbed to hang the birdfeeder.”

“You got to the first branch, where you had me lean a ladder,” he said. “Climbing a ladder and a tree are not the same. You don’t climb that tree unless you shimmy up.”

“I see your point,” she agreed.

Mr. Brundage heard her tone and regretted his.

“No, dear,” he said. “A child could climb.” Against all reason, he imagined how such a fantasy climb might go, and said: “A child could reach by shimmying up.”

Mrs. Brundage looked out the window. Mr. Brundage apologized to his wife for how he had sounded.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “A man shouldn’t regret sounding the way he sounds.”

He told her he didn’t mean to say it so rough.

“I was silly to think it,” she said.

“You silly girl,” he said.

She tried to laugh.

“You’re being silly now,” he said, “saying that you were silly to think it.”

“Of course,” she said. “It was the wind.”

“It could have been children or the wind,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, brightening. “You can climb to a point. You can get so high before branches thin.”

She stood at the window. She looked at the birdfeeder. She wondered whether birds would return. Surely the bag frightened them by flapping when wind blew. If she were a bird, she would avoid such noise. Now birds would return. Birds would eat from the feeder and flutter to the grass and eat seeds spilled in the haste of hunger. And sing. She imagined hungry little birds in her heart.

“If God wills it,” she said, “it will be.”

She crossed her fingers, all the same.

Mr. Brundage closed the magazine and placed it in his lap. He removed his glasses and placed them atop the magazine. He closed his eyes and held his left arm with his right hand, and tried to bend his left elbow. His arm slept.

He dreamed of a killer comet striking the road outside. Dying would come, but was it from concussion or heat? The magazine did not specify. Rolling pressure or spreading fire, shattering or burning the tree. There would come a sudden lapse of breath, and it would bake her into ash or blow her apart in clumps, a head one way, legs the other, holocaust or butchery. Dying would start by the edge of the of the sitting room, consume her, yet spare him, scorch flimsy magazines and sterner volumes, pop mandolin strings, melt wax-paper drawings but leave him, as though he were the second-born son in a story. That tale and later accounts conspired to lead him through the world as though the façade of every building from here to the city was a deception, the reflective side of a police house mirror.

Mr. Brundage opened his eyes.

Mrs. Brundage told her husband she loved him. She anticipated his response. Indeed, he loved her more.