A short, unsentimental novel about a dying woman and her husband's attempts to come to grips with being a widower.

She hasn't been dead for four months, and I've already eaten to the bottom of the deep freeze.

"Complex, compact...The architecture of this novel is remarkable."
-- Padgett Powell

"Kaye Gibbons has put together a small masterpiece."     -- J. E. Carpenter

"Kaye Gibbons shows us the secret core of a love that easily outlasts death. It's invisible mastery, but mastery all the same."
-- Reynolds Price

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the daughter of Carolina gentry. He was a skinny tena nt farmer who had never owned anything in his life. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each ot her and held on for dear life.