into walls that were out of square. The floors weren’t floors, but tamped earth. We worked together through July flooding and storms and weeks of dry weather. The windows, set into cockeyed frames, were shimmed in with spongy bits of elm wood. Without siding, the cellulose insulation sank into its plastic sheeting, leaving large gaps at the ceiling. But it wasn’t until the heavy upsetting heat of August, after we set the pallet floor right on the ground, screwed plywood to it, and coated it in polyurethane, that I took up the unspoken subject with Karen. We lay nose to nose over Perley’s head, and I could feel Karen’s thick toenails against my shinbone. It was close quarters there with Perley drooling between us, but it wasn’t clear yet whether Karen and I would really touch again the way we used to do. I reached for her as best I could.
“Helen’s no carpenter at all,” I said. “Not even half of one.” I felt Karen stiffen. “But you are,” I said. “That cabin you built at the Land Trust will probably be the only thing left standing after the apocalypse.” I ran my hand down her shoulder. She shrugged it away.
“So what?” she said. “So what if I’m a better builder than Helen? You’re a better builder than Helen, too. Perley’s probably a better builder than her.”
“Why don’t you tell her that?” I asked.
“Why don’t you?” she asked. I didn’t answer. “Exactly,” she said. “You know why. This is Helen’s place.”
“That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “Helen says she wants things equal. She wants it to be our place, too. We’re not her employees.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Karen.
“She’s very welcoming,” I said.
“Right,” Karen said. “She’s very welcoming. She’s so fucking welcoming it’s like we’re not even here. Her welcoming takes up the entire twenty acres. No room for anyone else.” She cupped Perley’s heel, looked at me hard. “Do you want to stay here?” she asked.
“I planted asparagus,” I said.
She nodded. “This is a good place,” she said. “The spring, the creek, the garden, the ducks. And the forest. We can stand on the ridge and only see one light. All that coal company land between us and them.”
“You want to stay,” I said.
“I want to stay,” she said. “Helen can say what she wants about things being equal. But you see how she is. She wants things her own way. Notice she hasn’t rushed to put our names on anything official. I’m not going to push it. Helen thinks she’s in charge, but if we play this right, we’ll still be right here after she burns out. I’ll fix what needs fixing later.” She managed to turn her nose from mine so that she faced the low ceiling. She removed her toe from my shin. “If you’ve got a better strategy,” she said, “then you can stand up to Helen yourself.”
But I never found a way to say word one to Helen, who, while gazing past us to the ridge beyond, had told us that we were her emergency phone number. That we were the people she’d call from jail if she had one phone call. That she loved us. She’d told us the story of where she came from. She’d always done what someone told her to, went to college when they told her to, wrote letters to one widowed aunt who didn’t understand why anyone would live without a man out of view of the Puget Sound, let alone live with those kind of people, by which she meant us. What kind of people are we? I asked. Not lesbians, Helen said. She’s not homophobic. Then what? I asked, but Karen said, She means rednecks, and Helen blushed. Helen said that when she’d been with Shane, her aunt was proud of them for striking out on their own. It seemed like a grand adventure. But now that she was single it was uncharted territory, she said, and to most people it just seemed unfortunate. The aunt sent her gifts, which she passed on to Perley: paints, bright slippers that were child-size, lip gloss that came in the shape of chocolate truffles. Helen said, It might be different if my uncle was still alive. Him, I could talk to. But my aunt is unaware that I’m a grown woman.
As if building the house wasn’t enough for her, Helen rose at dawn, buzzing, humming, learning, managing, bursting with good ideas that Karen and I didn’t want to hear