the handsaw, the clap of the hammer, and I found Karen and Perley kneeling in front of the camouflage camper, surrounded by scrap lumber. They bent their heads together over a piece of waxed cardboard. On it, a drawing of a table surrounded by three-legged stools, a shelf, what looked like a porch swing. The whole thing was covered over with measurements and notations. Perley wielded Rudy’s Sharpie, his tongue out, concentrating. Karen’s toolbox was unpacked around them.
“Mama K’s teaching me tools and whittling,” Perley said, barely glancing at me. He capped the Sharpie and began to arrange drill bits by size. He was wearing Karen’s tool belt, cinched beyond the last hole. “We’re going to make my house so sweet. It’s going to have everything I need for living forever.”
“The camper could use a table and chairs,” Karen said. “It could use a bunk bed. A bookshelf.”
“Have you been inside it?” I asked her.
“Of course she has,” Perley said. “How else could we have figured out how high to make my new bunk?” He took her sheepsfoot blade from the tool belt, held it up proudly. “She’s showing me how to carve spindle legs,” he said.
“Mortise-and-tenon joints,” Karen said. “We’ll need to use the chisels.”
“Does she know the password?” I asked. They looked at each other.
“It’s a secret,” Karen said.
They spent their days together building, as Perley’s red wound healed to yellow, as the sutures began to wear away and fall off. To Helen’s unmasked joy, Karen documented her care of him in the Best Practices Binder, dating her entries, detailing the whole process. “You’ll have a scar,” Karen said. “But why shouldn’t you?”
“Toxic,” Perley said.
* * *
Rudy brought us an orange tomcat, mean and squint-eyed. It peed all over the house, but it didn’t get rid of the black snakes, who’d all come back. We didn’t notice them so much because of the garbage bags, the window frames, the bike, the insulation, the utility sink, the high chair, the old sleeping bags, all of it soaked in cat pee. Underneath all the junk, the snakes switched their tails and smelled with their tongues, trying to stay warm as the days turned cold.
It was mid-December, dark early, freezing by dinnertime. But our house was overrun, so we built the campfire big those evenings, and we put on our coats, and we ate our supper outside. Perley took up his nightly reports to Karen again, going over what he’d learned that day. “Cut on the outside edge,” he said. “Make the line disappear.” His wound had healed to where we didn’t dress it anymore. His crescent scar cast a shadow down his cheek, luminous in the firelight. “For finish work, countersink before driving in your screws.” He demonstrated how to use her sheepsfoot blade on a chair leg. Shadowboxing, he demonstrated his sucker punch. Karen said, “That’s not sportsmanlike. Watch this.” She turned a somersault over one shoulder, came up on both feet, knees bent, ready to strike.
“Where’d you learn that?” asked Helen.
“Just something I picked up on my travels,” Karen said.
After, wrapped up warm in our coats, I held him. I didn’t know the password, but I held him. I rocked him. I carried Perley up to the camper, where earlier Karen had stoked his fire and shut the stove down so that it would be warm when he came to bed. I whispered his name. I carried him to his door. He raised his mending face. I leaned down to kiss it. It was like going on a date, the chaste kind I had liked to imagine as a kid, before I knew what would be required of me. He waved goodbye. He went inside. He latched the door.
Perley’s snake had fled, maybe to nurse its wounds, maybe to die from them. But it wasn’t in our bed, and Perley wasn’t in our bed, and so Karen and I had our bed to ourselves. We hardly knew what to do. Waiting for Helen’s light to go off, we lay on our sides facing each other, uninterrupted and shy. Through the partition, Helen began to snore. I took Karen’s hands and placed them on my breasts, tight with milk.
“They’re enormous,” she said.
“They hurt,” I said.
“This is a mastitis risk,” she said. “Something must be done.”
She put her mouth there. It was a task that needed doing. She sucked to take care of me, and it was how we found our way back to each other, her sucking, me moaning,