Idle curiosity

A tiny old man dressed in a red-and-white-striped bathrobe stands outside the white clapboard hotel that for ninety years housed the transients of Half Moon. A former farmer, and ex-husband of two very different women, Ed Check surveys the land that used to be his. He thinks about his daughters: the one who stays close to home and who "keeps what she thinks and feels so deep inside her that it's too far from her face to have any effect"; the one who has come home without her husband and is falling for the new optometrist in town, Nelson Alvin (rhymes with ball peen). But how could he know…