the ground. Helen climbed a ladder. Karen steadied it. With their bright faces under the sweep and gleam of the dogwood, they could have been mistaken for the best of friends.
3
KAREN
I spent my twenties traveling and watching. A woman alone, it wasn’t hard for me to get rides, and it wasn’t only men who offered them. Families with a protective streak pulled right over. I watched them. I watched the people who let me camp out in their yards, watched the people who hired me to do odd jobs, carpentry or electric work or apple picking. I watched families at diners and in bus stations. I watched parents all over this great land being bullied by their toddlers over soda and TV and bedtime. I watched them bribe their own kids to do simple chores. I watched them hand their kids over to strangers who’d stick them behind a desk for six hours every day. Even on my lonely days, the days I didn’t know if I was fit for human company, I knew I could do it better. I certainly knew I could raise my kid better than the way I was raised. My mom coming at me with endless platters of white and yellow food so that I hid in the woods at the sound of the dinner bell. My dad, who I’d swear went on disability just so he’d have more time to roam around the county and brag. Deirdre used to talk about coming out to her family like it was some big thing, but what about when your family doesn’t hear you when you talk? I hardly noticed when my dad’s mind started to go, because the only thing he’d ever remembered about me was my whittling, probably because he was the one gave me my sheepsfoot blade. At my mother’s bedside, and then at her funeral, I whittled my first skull. I gave the carving to my dad, and, just like Lily, he lost it, like I knew he would. The only good part of growing up was how much time I’d had to spend in the woods, alone with my knife, my wood, and my comics.
It took almost three years of planning and trying before Lily was pregnant with Perley. The day we found out, on the Land Trust, we dragged our mattress out beneath the sumac tree at the edge of the pasture. In those days we rushed to close any air between us. We lay there and talked about what kind of parents we wanted to be. It felt good. It felt like love.
“I want to be taken for granted,” I said, holding her. “I want it to be news to the kid that my feelings could be hurt, that I even have feelings at all. To be boring, that’s the real trick. Let the kid be the exciting one.”
“What else?” she asked.
“I want to be the provider,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “But you also want to be alone.”
“It’s not that I want to be alone,” I said. “It’s that I am alone. Sometimes.”
“Well, I don’t want to be alone,” Lily said. “That’s not what I signed on for.”
“We’re a wolf pack,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“My breadwinner.” She sighed, burrowing close.
“Not the breadwinner,” I said. “The provider.”
“What’s the difference?” she asked.
“I want to provide education, skills, and structure,” I said.
“Structure?” Lily asked. “You mean a house?”
“A house,” I said. “And stability. I want to be so There that this kid doesn’t even know what There is because the kid’s life is defined by There. I want to be so There that I’m not there.”
I put my mouth into Lily’s hair, sucked a strand, pushed with my nose. “What about you? What kind of parent do you want to be?” I asked.
She touched her belly button, which was still concave. She was only six weeks along. “I can’t really imagine being a parent,” she said. “All I can imagine is this baby. When it comes out of there I’m going to get a bottle of Elmer’s glue, and I’m going to glue it to me. I’m going to love whoever it is until its head pops.” She turned in my arms, her body beginning to generate quarts of new blood. Twined together, we upset the sumac. It dropped its berries to smear our bodies the color of rust.
* * *
By mid-October the house was pretty much finished, even though Helen had ignored every single piece of building expertise I offered, treated