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  A couple of weeks later, she stopped by again. This time with another twelve-pack. “Wanted to see how you were making out,” she said by way of welcome and explanation.

  This time she stayed. Not for long. Just long enough to see that he’d yet to move in. He was still at the cabin, coming out to the farmhouse now and then. He’d done little in the way of improvements. Threw some of the decaying furniture into a pile behind the barn. Ripped the peeling wallpaper back in a few places. Pulled up the carpet in spots. He wasn’t sure where to begin or what to finish. Sally clicked her tongue as she assessed his efforts, without making any comments. Darius wondered if she had nostalgia for the house, for some set of childhood memories made there, and if that was why she kept reappearing. As if in answer to his unspoken question, she said how much she had hated the place, how much she had disliked having to spend weekends there when she was a kid, away from her drinking, fighting parents, but alone with her taciturn grandmother, with no television and a plate of boiled dinner.

  “What’s boiled dinner?” Darius asked.

  “Bunch of tasteless meat and vegetables boiled together. Then you chop it up and serve it again in the morning as shit on a shingle.”

  He grinned at her. He was starting to get her sense of humor.

  “I’ll make it for you sometime,” she said, grinning back.

  She wandered the rooms with him again, pointing at things and offering advice on how to remove wallpaper, prep pipes so they didn’t freeze, whom to call to get the utilities turned back on, the steps required to refinish the floors. She told him real snow would be there soon enough and gave him the name of someone to plow the driveway, showed him how to secure his garbage so the raccoons and bears wouldn’t get in it, and cautioned him about the dangerous listing of the porch stairs.

  “My ex was a contractor. Handyman,” she said by way of explanation. “’Course, just about anyone who can swing a hammer around here is.”

  By the time Sally stopped by again, a couple of weeks later, Darius had gotten all the wallpaper off the walls of the dining room and the matted gold-tone carpet out of one of the bedrooms. He’d picked up a few mismatched chairs, a wobbly table, and a random collection of plates, cutlery, and cooking utensils.

  “Where’d you get this shit?” Sally asked.

  “Mostly junk shops,” he answered. “Plenty of those around.”

  “Guess you’re not as much of a rich boy as I thought,” she said, setting down the pizza she’d brought in with her.

  And you’re not as much of a white-trash bitch as I thought, Darius almost said but kept to himself instead.

  Darius had also acquired a mattress. This was the only thing he’d purchased new. On sale. No box spring, just a stark white rectangle thrown down on the floor of an empty upstairs bedroom with a twisted sleeping bag curled up on it like something already asleep. After they finished the pizza and the beer—in bottles, this time—Sally spent the night. Their sex, in spite of the mattress, was no more leisurely than before.

  Sally started showing up regularly most weekends. And instead of just pointing and giving advice, she would strap on a tool belt and help out. Darius never asked why she’d come over or if she’d come again, and Sally never offered an explanation. Darius would hear the rattle of an old truck and look out the window from whatever task he was at, wondering if it was Sally instead of the toothless manure-smelling guy who plowed his driveway for him. Darius was always vaguely irritated by, but also reluctantly glad for, her company. He loved his solitude, but the weeks were long and unrelieved, the snows were starting in earnest, and there was little to do but work and read. He’d moved on from self-help to spiritual texts about Wicca, astrology, living off the land, and removing your own ego, along with how-to texts on carpentry, plumbing, gardening, raising chickens, basic wiring. He felt he was getting a firm grasp on the lofty tenets of the former set of books but was still struggling with the practical aspects of the latter. He would never admit it, but Sally was an enormous help. Tools came alive in her hands and behaved like willing participants. When she was there, tasks were completed more than twice as fast and in a steady progression. And the results were sturdier, straighter, more complete.

  One time Sally arrived with groceries instead of pizza, and together they made boiled dinner. As he washed and chopped vegetables under Sally’s direction, it occurred to Darius that he was having fun. Together, they groaned over the bland taste of the parsnips, cabbage, and potatoes and the rough texture of the poor cut of meat. Darius plucked a jar of mustard out of the mostly empty refrigerator and a shaker of salt from the vacant cabinet, and they smirked as they slathered and sprinkled the condiment and spice on their dinner. Sally told him stories of her grandmother pouring vodka into her orange juice in the morning and buying herself a chainsaw on the way home from her husband’s funeral because he never let her have one when he was alive. Darius laughed and then realized he could not remember the last time he’d done so.

  “Why?” he asked her, the beer and shared domestic activity loosening his tongue. “Why do you keep coming here and helping me out?”

  “Would you rather I didn’t?”

  “No, I’m glad of the help. Glad of the company,” he said, and meant it.

  “Yeah,” she said, “you seem kind of lost out here.”

  “Is that why you’re here? Feel a little sorry for me?” He smiled at her, trying to put on a bit of the charm that used to come so fluidly to him. He was out of practice. He was also afraid she’d say yes. And that she had real reasons to feel that way.

  “Don’t feel sorry for you one bit,” Sally said, surprising him. “You have plenty of options, I’m sure.” She shifted in her chair. Lit a cigarette. “I think at first, I was just curious,” she went on. “Wanted to see if you’d fail. Honestly, figured you would. Go back to Mommy and Daddy and finish college, and get a job in a nice carpeted office with a briefcase instead of a toolbox. Always suspect I’ll drive up and find you’ve quit the place. I’m actually pretty amazed you’ve stuck it out.”

  Darius watched her. He’d never seen himself as Sally did. Someone who didn’t give up. Someone who accomplished things.

  “Then, well, I guess I just started to like you,” she said. “Not many men like you around here. You’re not very tough. But very improvable. You’re different, that’s for sure.”

  Different. Darius grabbed onto the word. That’s it, he thought.

  He had always felt different from those around him. But in the world he came from, different was a bad thing, something to be suppressed. The goal was to wear the brand of clothes, have the kind of job, go to the sort of school, say the kind of things, behave in the sort of way that signaled to a select group that you were one of them. He’d done that, he’d played by those rules, but there was a small internal treachery that always leaked out and gave him away, made people from the social circle he allegedly belonged to move a few steps away from him as if he emitted a bad smell. This was the first time he’d ever heard someone use the adjective different with a positive connotation.

  Different. Yes, he thought, that’s what I am. That’s what I want to be.

  Through the months of winter while the snow piled up outside, Darius—and often Sally and Darius together—tore out wallpaper, linoleum, and carpet. They sanded and scraped and cleaned and stained and painted. They created burn piles for the debris and flipped through seed catalogs. They often ate only a pizza or a submarine sandwich, sometimes frozen dinners, even as they discussed the best tomato and lettuce varieties they’d grow the next summer. They went to junk shops and collected furniture and tools. Darius’s hands blistered and peeled and finally formed calluses. Sally rubbed Bag Balm into his ruined palms and then guided his tingling fingers down between her legs. He’d never done that with a woman before, never performed manual or oral sex. His experience was limited to hurried humping sessions with usually drunk women. He’d never concerned himself with a woman’s climax before, just hurr
ied on to his own. He didn’t especially enjoy doing what Sally asked him to do, but as he had with the home repairs, he followed her firm lead.

  One day, Sally arrived with a duffel bag and a box of her stuff. She said the lease on her apartment, which he’d never been invited to, had come up and she didn’t want to renew. She threw her duffel onto the bedroom floor and said it would just be until she found something new. She also reminded him that, as long as he paid the mortgage, the place was his. But the minute he fell behind, it was hers. He felt as if she were lifting her leg on the place, marking her territory. She never bothered to look for anything else, though, and he never asked her to. He didn’t really like her very much, but he’d never really liked anyone very much. She was easy to be around, and he needed her help and counsel. Her company settled something in him.

  One day, he saw a FOR SALE sign on a two-tone truck in a muddy yard next to a double-wide trailer and traded the guy for his Saab. Sally looked under the hood and shook her head at his folly but never told him just how badly he’d been had. She only said he shouldn’t have gotten a rear-wheel drive, a mistake he didn’t understand until the afternoon he goosed it up the driveway, spun out, overcorrected, got the truck halfway into a ditch, and had to be pulled free by the plow driver. After that they put some bags of sand into the bed, Sally gave him some quick pointers on the difference between his front-wheel-drive, low-slung Saab and this high-clearance, rear-wheel-drive truck, and he drove more thoughtfully. He got stuck one more time in the middle-of-March mud season. But that time, he shoved some spare lumber he had in the back of the truck under the tires and drove himself out of his predicament. As he wiped his muddied palms on his finally well-worn pants, he felt the calm of competence seep into his limbs. He was pleased with himself. This was a new and welcome feeling.

  Then, as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown, spring arrived. From the thick, dead silence of winter, Darius and Sally were thrust into the season where frogs sent them to bed at night and birds woke them before dawn. They emerged from their labors in the house to the out-of-doors like children rubbing sleep from their eyes. They shoveled years’ worth of compacted manure from the stalls of the barn into raised beds made from lumber they salvaged when they dismantled an old shed. They laid out tidy rows in the dirt and eased the seedlings they’d started in plastic-wrap-covered trays near the kitchen windows into the soft, black humus. They got several chicks and a goat someone was giving away.

  There was now enough completed at the house that Darius began to take time away from chores at the property to hike the still-sloppy trails that wound their way up into the steep, flinty hillsides. He also began to visit start-up farm stands and consider what he might do with the bounty he was expecting from his own garden. He took long drives down the twisting roads empty of people and houses and considered that he had somehow made himself a home. He also began to entertain thoughts of what he might make of this home. Gardening and farm stands were not going to be enough for him. Milking the goat and feeding the chickens would not express the restless ambition that was growing in him, looking for a way out of him. He felt he had built something. All the books he’d read and the work he’d done had begun simmering together in his mind, coalescing into a strange philosophical brew of spirit and earth, idealism and practicality, dirty hands and fresh souls. He had kept his vision to himself. He didn’t want to risk what he instinctively suspected would be Sally’s ridicule. But he was starting to feel the impulse to share. Not through any impulse of generosity—he recognized this about himself—but because he felt he had something to say. He felt there were people who needed to hear what he was convinced he had to offer. He wanted to see them hearing it, to witness what he believed would be their inevitable transformation. That’s what the house was for. It was not just a home, it was a platform for a whole new relationship with the world.

  One early summer evening, when Sally came home from her day of shepherding paperwork and teenagers, she found Darius weeding in the garden. He’d been distant and moody recently, taking off for aimless drives and extended hikes, returning tired, muddy, preoccupied, turning into bed well before usual, snoring deeply by the time she crawled in. They’d not had sex in weeks. No, more than a month. Maybe longer. He rebuffed her efforts to arouse him, or indulged them to no effect, rolling over and quickly falling asleep once she’d given up. She hadn’t decided how to talk to him about it. If she even wanted to. She had enough of talking about things during her workdays.

  She brought him a beer from her car, but he waved it away, another new and increasingly frequent behavior. He raised his water bottle at her in explanation, which she recognized was also a passive rebuke of her own drinking. He’d recently asked her if she would smoke only outdoors. If she had to smoke at all. She was beginning to wonder if she’d been had, conned, charmed by this man. Part of her didn’t care very much either way. He’d helped her get over her last boyfriend, the one who cheated on her with several women they both knew, practically begging to be caught. Maybe that was all she’d needed Darius for. Maybe it was time to move on. She was starting to notice unsettling things about him. What had at first seemed a rather cute callowness was morphing into an annoying, smug self-righteousness. She found herself thinking she should double-check the paperwork on the house sale to make sure she could get the house back if he defaulted. Or if she just wanted to be rid of him. She found herself noticing the FOR RENT signs she passed on her way to work or saw on the tackboard in the break room. She started thinking she should get some distance from this place, this guy, this situation.

  Sally stood in the garden, two open beers in hand. Darius had turned his attention back to the plants in front of him. The mosquitoes and blackflies were thick—it had been a damp spring—but he was serene beneath a netted hat and long-sleeved shirt and pants in spite of the unusually hot, humid air. She made a suggestion about securing the beans to supports. He murmured a bland acknowledgment. She was being bitten by bugs. She shoved one beer in the dirt, the other in the back pocket of her jeans, and swatted at her bare arms. Her palms came back streaked with the black smudges of dead insects and red smears of her own blood. She wiped them off against a clump of grass.

  “I gotta get out of here,” she said.

  Darius looked up and nodded at her.

  Something strange in his face, she thought. He’s hiding something, was her next fleeting, inchoate thought.

  She waved the notion away. And the bugs, as well. She was annoyed at the insects, but now also at him. She went into the house with the two beers, dropped her purse on the kitchen table, opened the fridge, and shoved aside a few tofu cakes, a bag of spring greens, and several containers of homemade goat’s-milk yogurt to find the wizened lime she was looking to slice and slip into her Corona. She was standing at the counter, cutting into its desiccated rind, when she heard footsteps.

  Darius already? No, someone is inside the house.

  She turned, knife in hand.

  “Hi. You must be Sally.”

  The person who said these words was a thin reed, someone still straddling the line between girl and woman. She wore a patchwork skirt that fell to her skinny but well-muscled calves. Russet hair sprouted from her underarms, and the outline of wet-teabag breasts showed under her tank top. Her pale gray eyes regarded Sally blankly beneath an overgrown fringe of damp-darkened hair.

  This woman has just taken a shower in my house, Sally thought. She used my towels. This is so not OK with me.

  Sally took a long pull on her beer and said, “And who might you be?”

  “Mandy,” the other woman said, her eyes unflinching, blank and deflective to Sally’s unguarded hostility. “My name is Mandy. I am so very pleased to meet you.”

  “And what, Miss Mandy, brings you to our humble abode?” Sally asked.

  Mandy shrugged her bony shoulders, dipped her head, and grinned. She said one word, the name of the man in the garden, as if that was all the explanation required. She took a f
ew steps into the kitchen toward Sally, moving hips-first, slinky, as if she were on ball bearings. Sally tried to take a step backward, away from the intruder, but was caught against the counter. She held up her knife instead. Mandy stopped. Sally sidestepped her way across the room and out the door. Which she let slam behind her.

  “So who’s the houseguest?” she asked Darius when she got back to the garden.

  “I see you met Mandy,” Darius replied, without looking up from his weeding.

  “And who the fuck is this Mandy, and what the fuck is she doing in my kitchen? In my bathroom?” Sally tried for a joking tone, but rancor saturated her words.

  Darius stared evenly at her. “Your kitchen?” he asked. But before Sally could respond, he quickly added, “I met her hiking.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Sally said. “And just in case you haven’t done the math, you own not much more than ten grand of this little slice of heaven. I own the mortgage, which means I own the rest.”

  Darius stood and brushed the dirt from his knees. “I’m not sure I understand the hostility, Sally.”

  That emphasis on her name aggravated. The overtly calm tone of his voice irritated. She slapped at a mosquito on her forearm, swiped at a blackfly on the back of her neck.

  “It’s not the hostility. Darius. It’s all mine, I assure you,” Sally said.

  “She’s a guest,” Darius explained.

  “And is she staying long?”

  “As long as she needs to,” Darius said, his voice pitched to soothe, as if he were a funeral director greeting the bereaved.

  Sally felt her face prickle with heat. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Sally. She has nowhere to go. Her parents kicked her out of the house. They’re Christian missionaries or something, and they caught her boyfriend in her room with her, and she got stuck here while hitchhiking her way north. She was hoping to get to Canada.”