“I’m telling you a dolly won’t work,” Karen said. “And I’m sick of borrowing things from Frank.”
“Then you figure it out. Is this my job? To come up with ideas so you can shoot them down?” asked Helen.
“Do you want some kind of award for coming up with bad ideas that won’t work?” asked Karen.
“Anytime something goes wrong with the house it’s my fault, and anytime anything goes right it’s because you’re a genius,” Helen said.
“You’re hungry. Finish your sparrow,” Karen said.
“I’m not hungry, you’re hungry. And it’s not a sparrow, it’s a swift,” Helen said.
“I’m not hungry,” Karen said.
“Let’s have a housewarming party,” I said.
They looked at me.
“So people can help us move the woodstove,” I said.
“I don’t want to have a bunch of people up here to look at the shitty house we’re building,” Karen said.
“I don’t want people to help us,” Helen said.
I took Perley and walked away. I walked up through the garden and into the forest. I waded through the damp tangle of early autumn, the blackberries dying back, the grapevines, the flowering nettle and red clover turning brown and spongy. I was weak, and I was dizzy, but I made my way straight up to the saddle below the ridge, and I found a place to be alone with Perley. It was a sheltered place between a tulip poplar and a beech tree, where the dry leaves were cooked to brown and yellow. If I looked, I could see down through the trees to the garden, firepit, and house site, but they were far away, too far away to matter much. I swung Perley off my back and settled him in my lap, and he latched on to nurse.
No one was asking me, but I was beginning to answer. I was beginning to see that I lived with two women who were against things. They were against things, and I was one of those things. They were against each other so that they couldn’t see how alike they were. Helen liked telling people what to do. Karen didn’t like being told what to do. As for me, I liked being told what to do. But sometimes I couldn’t do it.
My grandma had been dead more than ten years, and I could hear her. What in the hell are you doing, girl? You take that baby and you leave. But leave and go where? I didn’t want the double-wide. I didn’t want the minimum wage. Or at least that’s not all I wanted. There was no room for me in the usual way, never had been. I’d known that as soon as I knew I loved women. Karen gave the usual script the once-over with that skeptical eye of hers, then she handed it back and insisted that life could be lived from scratch. We were hungry and angry, but we’d agreed to seek our fortune together. So far, she’d chosen wolf pack over stranger. She’s my pack, I told my grandma, and I can’t say that I would be any better off without her. I love Karen. More than that, Grandma. She reminds me of you.
Perley made his small steady nursing noise, his chug chug. He fixed me with his whale eye, that large peering marble next to my nipple. He gazed at me with—well, I guess I thought of it as trust, but not simple trust, more like don’t-fuck-this-up trust. Do you respect me? he was asking. I whispered into his face, I respect you. I respect the mystery of you. He laid his hand against my cheek and pinched. He reached up and touched his index finger to my eye, and he pressed hard. With Perley’s finger buried in my eyeball, stupid names came to me. He was my Lumpy Bundle, my Thorny Lamb, my Silken Puppy, my Fruit Bat, my Monster Rat, my Velvet Piglet.
I reached into my overalls and I took out the bottle of cooking oil that I’d smuggled from camp. I unscrewed the top and drank from it for ten full seconds before taking a breath. The golden oil coated my insides. It was meat and milk and cake and bread. Fat.
I rocked Perley and drank deeply. I looked down the hill. Through the leaves, I could see Helen and Karen far below at the house site. One of them dropped the nail gun and the other bent over to pick it up. I saw, but didn’t hear, a sheet of plywood crash to