Winter settles over Monta Clare, and during his first week back Patch stays inside the old house. He removes the dust sheets, opens the windows to the freezing air, and wears his father's heavy old clothes as he slowly reenters the place and his former life.

Sammy visits with whiskey and his usual insults, mocking both Patch's outfit and the house's bleak interior. When Sammy collapses a flimsy wicker chair and lands on the floor, Patch laughs hard enough to go outside, and the moment briefly breaks the heaviness around Patch's return.

Sammy then shifts from joking to helping. He gives Patch a check, explaining that he sold one of Patch's paintings, "the ice," to cover expenses such as the house taxes, because Patch had told him to take care of the property. Patch is pained by the sale and wonders if he could ever buy the painting back, but Sammy pushes him toward the future and tells him to paint another instead.

Before leaving, Sammy also brings two large bags of videotapes containing news footage from the six years Patch was gone, assembled through access to Channel 7 archives. The tapes give Patch a way to catch up on everything he missed and may help him continue his search. Their conversation ends with crude jokes about prison and confiscated Christmas food packages, but underneath the humor both men acknowledge, awkwardly and sincerely, that Patch's return matters to them and to the town.