hardware and salvage store. I kept it for five years before Karen walked in, rangy and loose in old work clothes, her messy braid unraveling beneath her mesh ball cap. She was a woman with skills, courage, strength, a woman who was good, so good with her hands. She was older than me. When you’re twenty-two, thirty sounds wise. She’d hitchhiked all over. There were all kinds of ways to live, she said, but none better than what we could make right here. She scoffed at New York City. She scoffed at talk of minimum wage, of double-wide if you’re lucky. She insisted we live in the cabin she’d built at the Land Trust, solid as a bomb shelter. She knew how to process roadkill. She insisted that we birth Perley at home. She insisted that we do for ourselves, and I hadn’t met anyone like her since my grandma passed. Karen had told Helen that she hadn’t learned her skills from books, and it was true. She’d learned them from the old folks, just like we all did. But she left out the fact that she measured our lives against ElfQuest, going on about the elves’ self-reliance, discipline, skill at hunting, wood carving, healing. I gave those comic books the once-over and noticed right away something the elves had that we didn’t: magic.
* * *
Karen whittled fast enough to make the shavings fly and spark into the flames, and Helen pierced a squirrel with a sharpened stick, thrust it out over the heat. At my nipple, Perley clamped down with his gums. I shifted his latch. I looked from Karen to Helen. I could feel their excitement build.
“But we haven’t been to the grocery store in two weeks,” I said, thinking of the single box of macaroni on the shelf, the five-pound bag of oats, the half loaf of stale bread, the jar of peanut butter dwindling each day. “We don’t have the money for it. Maybe one of us should go back to work soon.”
“No time to go back to work. We’ve got to build the house. And Perley needs us here,” Karen said.
“Anyway, I’ve got money,” Helen said.
“You do?” I asked.
“I saved plenty of money working for Rudy last year,” she said. “He wanted me back this season, too, but I told him not until the house is finished.”
“You have money?” I asked. My stomach felt vacuumed clean.
“We don’t need Helen’s money,” Karen said.
“It’s not about that,” Helen said.
“It’s about practicing and preparing,” Karen said.
“Right,” Helen said. “We can do better. We can certainly do better than we’ve been doing.”
“If one of us has money, then I think we should go to the grocery store,” I said. “I’m hungry. We’re almost out of peanut butter.”
“But what if there was no grocery store? That’s the point,” Karen said.
“I wonder how long we’d last,” Helen said.
“I’m breastfeeding, Karen,” I said.
“But what would we do if you were breastfeeding and there was no grocery store?” Karen said. “That’s what we need to be thinking about.” Helen nodded.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll go to the store tomorrow. Let’s make a grocery list.”
“Lily, stop it. You don’t have to go to the store,” Karen said.
“Okay, you can go,” I said. “I don’t care who goes. Why don’t we rock paper scissors to see who goes? Or we can roll the dice.”
“That’s it!” Helen said. “We’ll roll the dice.” With relief, I watched her produce the pouch of dice from where we stored it in the toolbox. She emptied the four dice into her hand. I was already picturing bread all squishy in its plastic bag, a brick of cheese, maybe even butter and milk, cold cuts, when Helen said, “From now on, when it’s time to go grocery shopping, we roll the dice. If we roll doubles, we go to the grocery store. If not, we subsist on what we have stored, and what we can get from this land.”
“Survival Dice,” Karen said, her eyes glowing. Their fight was forgotten. Who cared about the shitty house when we could starve together? I put my arms around Perley and held him to me until he wriggled and twisted, trying to turn himself to the fire. He liked to stare into the flames—like every other primate, Karen said—but I screwed my eyes shut. I hoped for Dog Paws, Snake Eyes, the Necklace, for the Squid. I hoped hard for doubles, and when I opened my eyes again, Helen had rolled double sixes, the Full