Waylon Joseph crouched behind Mercury’s ballfield bleachers on the south end of town, smoking a cigarette and hiding from his wife.

A day moon hung in the June sky as a crop of boys played a baseball game beneath it. Tiny mitts waved in the air as the ball soared wide. The rest of the park stooped beyond the field—a moldering pond, a slanted gazebo. I-80 beckoned just down the road and past the cedar trees, and yet Way couldn’t hear even one truck’s sorry bellow as it sped past.

The air around him felt thick, like honey and longing.

Waylon tapped the edge of his Salem with his finger, and ash fluttered to the dirt. Today, he told himself. Today you have to tell her. He’d said the same thing yesterday. The day before, too. Every day since he’d visited the bank.

Marley appeared between the bleachers’ rusted planks—the burnt-orange patina slicing her right through her middle. In her pink coach’s ball cap and cutoff jeans, she didn’t look a day past eighteen, when Waylon had fallen in love with her. She’d been somebody else’s high school sweetheart back then. Now, her auburn hair tangled in the breeze as she hoisted her hand toward the sky, and a field of eight-year-old boys waited for her to speak.

“Look alive,” she called toward the outfield.

A crack split the air as the other team’s batter hit a pop-up. The center fielder snatched the ball, and the inning ended.

Way leaned his forehead against the bleacher’s hot metal. It had taken only two words from Marley’s mouth to snap the boys to attention. She had such sway, and she couldn’t even see it. In the last eight years, so much of their marriage had become about power—who had it, who gave it away. A slippery, constant leveling of the scales.