money down to start. But we could put your names on it. We’ll pay the land taxes together. You won’t owe me anything.” It got my attention, and I could see Karen was listening, too. In our four years together, Karen and I had never lived anywhere we weren’t just renting. Even the Land Trust, with all its talk about sisterhood, owned the cabin Karen built. We were probates. We paid. Not much, but enough that we couldn’t afford to have both of us home with Perley much longer. We were already a month behind, as Deirdre and Janice gently reminded us at weekly land meetings. Still, I reached out and put my hand on Helen’s arm.
“Slow down,” I said. “What’s this about?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Why us?” I asked.
The stew spat, sizzled. Perley farted. Helen looked hard at the ceiling.
“I don’t really know any other people,” she said. Karen looked at me like, Danger, danger, but my eyes were already full.
“I thought you were going back to Seattle,” Karen said.
“And just walk away from that piece of land?” Helen asked, voice like she’d swallowed wet fur.
“There’s no place to live out there but that camouflaged camper,” Karen said. “Which is smaller than this place, for Christ’s sakes.”
“Move onto my place in the spring, and we’ll build a house this summer,” Helen said, herself again.
“Can’t afford to build a house,” Karen said.
“We’ll salvage material,” Helen said, as if butting heads with Karen was the final ingredient to her resolve. “Frank’s selling me the seconds his crew demos. They’re replacing some professor’s roof next week and giving us the old one.”
“Us,” Karen repeated, shaking her head.
“Hardly a thing wrong with it,” Helen said.
“When are we going to have this house finished by?” asked Karen.
“We’ll move in next fall,” Helen said.
“Next fall? Better be a small house, then,” Karen said.
“It’ll be the perfect size for three,” Helen said.
“Four,” I said.
“Right,” Helen said.
“Since when do you know how to build?” asked Karen.
“I half know how to build, so if you half know how to build, then that makes one whole carpenter,” Helen said.
“Half know how to build? What the hell does that mean?” Karen asked.
“You built this cabin, didn’t you?” Helen said.
“I’m half of nothing,” Karen said, and caught Perley’s waving hand. But then she smiled a little, or glared, depending on how you looked at it. Her wait-and-see smile. I could tell she was beginning to consider the thing.
We hadn’t known each other long when Karen said these two sentences in a row: You should know I’m bound to be alone. I want to provide for you. I’d laughed. How can both of those things be true? I’d asked. To find out, I began to sleep in her bed on the Land Trust so often that I lived there. I put up with her never-show-you-like-it, her wait-and-see, her storms. When she said, I want to have a baby with you, I’d answered, I want to have a baby with you. I couldn’t help but add, That’s the opposite of being alone, you know. She just gave me that smile again. In bed at night, Karen held her comic books up to Perley’s silly face, whispered, “We are a wolf pack.” To live with Karen was to watch the daily fight unfold. Stranger or provider. Loner or wolf pack. Wait and see.
Helen couldn’t take it. Into the silence, she said, “I figure we’ll eat mostly what we can grow or hunt. Or gather from the woods.”
“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” Karen said.
“I’ve been learning a lot about wild foods,” Helen said.
“Who from?” asked Karen.
“I’ve been reading,” Helen said.
“I might have known it,” Karen said.
“Karen’s into wild foods, too,” I said. “She’s always boiling down elderberries for medicine and drying nettles for soup and tea.”
“But I didn’t learn it in a book,” Karen said.
“I can do without that stuff,” I said. “Reminds me too much of lean times growing up.”
“You just have to know the right way to do it,” Helen said. “Mushrooms, huckleberries, hickory nuts, acorns. Especially acorns. It takes some work to process them, but that’s the way to get calories.”
“Have you done it?” asked Karen.
“I’ve calculated the amount we’d need to get all of us through next winter,” Helen said.
“Calculated,” Karen said.
“Did you know there’s seventy native trees in this bioregion?” Helen asked.
“More than that,” Karen said.
Oh lord, Helen was hard to take, barreling in from some West Coast city with her college degree, not knowing a