Emma rested her hand on Henry’s arm the way she’d done for the thirty-five years they’d been married. “You know what I’m thinking?” she said. “Burning our place to the ground. Insurance pays more than the government.”

“There’s no need to lie,” Henry said.

“Sometimes it brings comfort for a while.”

If there was comfort to be gained, Henry thought, the fire should take the houses of the men who had approved the location of the new freeway’s interchange. He reached into Emma’s laundry basket, lifted out the coil of clothes line, strung it pole to pole, and tugged it tight before he picked up his pitching wedge and the bag of old golf balls he planned on hitting after he got some answers from the surveyors who were busy near the edge of their three acres.

One wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans, the other an orange vest as if, though it was months yet until deer season, he was afraid of being shot. Henry called out his question as he was drawing close. “They’ll do whatever needs to be done with your trees,” the man wearing orange said. “I don’t have any more say in this than you do.”

Both men, Henry noticed, were keeping an eye on the pitching wedge. The flannel shirt one said, “You’re luckier than the folks next door and all the rest down toward Route 19. They’re gone.”

“This earth right here is mine,” Henry said, sweeping the wedge in an arc just close enough to back flannel shirt up one step.

“That’s what you think,” the man in the orange vest said, but Henry was already walking to where, thirty yards from the surveyors, he’d mowed a tee box. He took a stance, aiming at a spot about eighty yards away, getting a tight bunch of beat-up balls going inside a ten-yard mown circle. After twenty swings, it looked as if a dozen had landed on his small, homemade green. He glanced back at the surveyors, but if they’d watched, they gave no sign. From where he stood, the scuffed and yellowed balls looked like the mushrooms his nearsighted friend Bob Hastings had sometimes, two summers before, stood over in the rough, befuddled for a second before searching somewhere else.

Hastings had lived two houses away. By the time the new thruway was announced, Hastings had been diagnosed Stage-4 Terminal. Nobody told him the house he was dying in would be leveled and replaced by enormous swirls of concrete. Three weeks ago, Hastings had died at home, the view from his window the same one he’d been looking at for thirty years. A blessing, Henry thought.

He’d read about people whose land was flooded by a new dam. How terrible it was for them to know there was going to be a lake where they were standing, boats floating thirty feet over their abandoned houses. It was the way he’d thought of heaven as a boy, a beautiful world just above the sky. A notion he’d put aside years ago.

He could hear Emma shouting something from the yard where she was standing under the double strands of clothesline. Henry could tell she had a problem with how tight he’d pulled the cord, that she couldn’t reach to pin the first damp shirts to the line, using the weight of them to pull it to a comfortable level. “Jump,” he said aloud, sounding, he thought, like an interchange planner.

“Henry!” Emma shouted and reached for the line again, her breasts lifting, her dress riding up her thighs as he reached the immaculate, freshly mowed lawn, a long-putt distance from where she struggled, looking young and beautiful.

“I watched,” Emma said. “Those two would have had you arrested if that club touched one of them.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I saw you thinking it.”

“The same as nothing,” Henry said, but he dropped the wedge, lifted a white sheet from the basket, and spread it as far as his extended arms would allow, its damp weight sagging the rope to head high, a height Emma could easily reach. For a moment, he surveyed their yard all the way to the stand of trees. Then he lifted a damp shirt from the basket and, doing something, pinned it beside the sheet.