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devotion. He asked her to move to the trailer—even promised to get rid of Peg—but Fiona made excuses. She said she liked her writing table. She said she hated trailers. She said for all she knew Yank was just on a trip with his new motorcycle and would be back within a couple of years. They both laughed, and Skidmore started paying the rent to the sheriff's brother. He never told Fiona about the Dakota Sioux woman and the Pine-Sol, but sometimes Fiona saw panic and desperation in Skidmore's eyes, aloneness and futility, distraction. Sometimes he was rough, and his humor was hard and grim. He seemed to take more than he gave, and sadly.
    She wrote in her journal: "Sometimes I sense that we are only moments from one of those confessions or surrenders that are suddenly blurted out and change people's lives." She would watch him closely, wondering what was on his mind.
    Skidmore called Fiona his "blue cowgirl," because she had confided in him that she got the idea to leave Valdosta from the book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which she was reading the very day her divorce finally came through. In her own mind and probably in reality, the "blue cowgirl" phase had ended with Yank and the move from the Long Pine farm house. Having put that period behind her, she no longer appreciated allusions to it. She was now seeking "liberation," and liberation was the subject of her writing, liberation from her own past and from the traditional limitations of traditional womanhood, but liberation even beyond those things—liberation generally, the elusive freedom suggested by the very ring of the word. That was the current phase for Fiona.
    She was subscribing to literary magazines and Harper's and Atlantic , and it seemed like every single story had a woman in it who started lifting weights. Fiona couldn't afford weights, but she started toning up, doing exercises every day. She read in Time that fitness was what was happening for today's woman—that's what Time referred to them as, today's woman—and so Fiona did daily exercises, jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, stretching exercises. She practiced kung-fu moves she found in a Cosmopolitan she'd borrowed from the laundromat. She took up nothing that demanded the purchase of special shoes, special support, or special designer sweat clothes.
    The afternoon he first learned about all this, Skidmore arrived as usual and shifted his shopping bag full of Stroh's to the other arm so he could hammer out the code on the door with his right hand, when he noticed the door was ajar. He cautiously pushed it open and from there could hear her in the kitchen. In there, he found her on the floor doing sit-ups.
    "Why's the door unlocked?"
    "Saw you coming up the sidewalk from the window—didn't want you to interrupt, so I opened it between sets. I'll be done in a minute." She was wearing nothing but the sweat bands on her arms and a pair of navy blue panties.
    "What's going on?" Skidmore asked, popping open a beer.
    "Check it out," she grunted, pointing toward the news magazine on the kitchen table. She was working out on a small black throw rug, a feeble cushion between her and the old linoleum. Her hair was glossy from exertion.
    "I thought you wrote in the afternoon."
    "What's it to you?" she said, smiling as her face came up. Her hands were behind her head, and her feet were locked down by tucking her toes under the kitchen cabinet. "Hang around," she said. "Push-ups are next."
    "Push-ups? Getting ready to enlist?"
    "Funny. Trying to make me lose count or what?"
    "How about a beer?"
    "Never touch it."
    "Oh yeah? Since when?"
    "Since this morning. Stop it, you're making me lose count."
    "Sandwich?"
    She stopped. "Will you please get out of here? You're embarrassing me. I'm toning up. Read the magazine. I'm twenty nine years old—I've got to get after it while the getting is good."
    "I'm thirty-five," Skidmore said, his arms up in the air to indicate that even at that age he was