To hold a grievance against fate accomplishes nothing; things occur without reason or rhyme, and no more can be said. Railing against such fortune is to censure wood smoke or wind and to be sorrowed through all the days of your passing. In the end, there is nothing left except to shoulder whatever you have been handed and to go on.

Francesca Johnson listened to the spattering of rain on her slicker hood and remembered reading those words somewhere, maybe in one of the books she received from her mail-order book club. And in her own way, she held no such grievances and was reasonably content. When she sorrowed, it was not because she made the decision sixteen years ago to stay with her family instead of leaving with Robert Kincaid. The sorrow came from having been required to make the choice fate and her own actions had put before her.

After Richard died, she stopped trying to thrust aside her memories of Robert Kincaid, of their time together, and simply let him come into her mind whenever he wanted to. God, he seemed Life itself to her back then, full of energy and physical power, talking of the road and dreams and loneliness. And in the nights of their days with each other, and in the days as well, she had taken him into her and loved him with a kind of intensity springing from all the years of a suppressed and desperate longing for something she couldn’t even articulate until Robert Kincaid rolled into her life.

Sometimes in her silent bed, with Carolyn’s old phonograph playing “Autumn Leaves,” she would caress her breasts and imagine him there again, moving over her and taking her like the leopard she had called him in the journals she kept. Was it only sixteen years ago? It felt longer. Another lifetime. Another way of being. And yet on other nights when her mind came around to hold him, it seemed he had been with her only a moment before.

Robert Kincaid was to her, among other things, a gracious man, representing a kind of civility she saw in decline everywhere she looked. He could have tried devious means of reaching her over the years. But he paid attention when she spoke of her family and why she could never leave. And she was sure his silence was only because he did not want to cause her pain by exposing what had happened between the two of them.

She tried to imagine what it would be like if they should ever meet again. Ever at her age, would she behave like a school girl on her first date? Would he still be a little awkward and shy, as when they had first met? Would they still want to make love or maybe just sit in her kitchen and remember? She hoped they would make love.

No matter how hard she tried to be truthful with her images, no matter how much she tried honest extrapolation from the way he had been to the way he might be now, she still saw Robert Kincaid as he stepped from his truck, on a summer afternoon. And she always would see him that way, she suspected. As such, she supposed she was the same as anyone else who has loved another person for a long time. Seeing them always in soft focus was a form of kindly protection rather than dishonesty.

And there was part of her that believed he was no longer alive. As months, years, went by, that part seemed to grow in her thoughts, though she could never reconcile herself to that possibility.

Behind her she heard a vehicle coming along the road. Harmon, Floyd Clark ’s hired man, slowed down to pass her and was careful not to splatter mud. When he was safely past, Harmon accelerated toward the Clark farm three miles farther east. Francesca walked on, her boots making sucking noises where the mud pulled at them. She was a mile from Roseman Bridge.

Robert Kincaid scouted the bridge from a distance, making sure no one was around it, then began slowly walking downhill toward the river. At times, fog almost enveloped the bridge, lifted for a moment, and then closed in once more.

Inside, the bridge smelled rank, old damp wood and pigeon scat, wet leaves. There were graffiti on the was, some new, some having been there for the last twenty years, carved by those who seemed to have no other way of announcing to the world that they, too, existed and were of consequence.

The temperature was dropping, and his bad ankle stiffened. He bent over to massage it, working on it until the ache became tolerable. He took a small bottle of aspirin from his coat, shook out two, and choked them down without water.

Below him, Kincaid could hear the sound of Middle River burbling toward the east. He looked through a space where a side board had dropped away and saw the rock on which he stood all those years ago when he looked up at Francesca Johnson. There were flowers along the banks of Middle River in that August, and he had picked a handful of black-eyed Susans for her.

He was glad he had come. It had not been a mistake. Here, in the old bridge, he felt a kind of serenity, and he bathed in the feeling and became quiet within himself. At that moment, he was comforted knowing this place would be his home ground, the place where his ashes would someday drift out over Middle River. He hoped some of his dust would become one with the bridge and the land, and that some might wash far downstream and into larger rivers and then into all the seas he had crossed on crowded troopships or night jets to somewhere.

Rain dripped from the bridge’s eaves and through the holes in the roof where shingling had long since peeled away. He leaned against a support post and simply let all the feelings, as they had been sixteen years ago and were now, come over him.