Deschutes sucked his teeth. “It’s for a little black girl. You got any black princesses?”

“Afraid not,” Peter said, realizing how bad this sounded. “But I can make you one. We could sketch something right now if you wanted.”

“You could do that for me?”

“It’s part of what we do here.”

Deschutes told Peter exactly what he wanted, down to the way the princess’s hair should be braided. “Nothing too crazy, with those plastic bobble things. Just nice, simple braids.”

Peter sketched the princess while the old man watched over his shoulder, the smell of his breath like an old metal spoon.

“You have good form,” Deschutes said. “Good control. And eyes— they’re natural for you. Took me years before I could do eyes. You wouldn’t believe how many paintings I blew through, paintings of perfectly beautiful women whose eyes were dead, dead, dead. Might as well have given them doorknobs for eyes.”

“My dad taught me,” Peter said. Nobody, not even his art teachers, had ever complimented him on his eyes, though it had always been a secret source of vanity.

“You know,” Deschutes said, “I could use some help around the house. I’m not in the best health these days. My fingers—the ones I got left—they go stiff. Doctor says it’s arthritis, but I think it’s more personal than that. My whole body’s raging a war against me. Some days I can barely pick up a bar of soap.” He paused, his face trembling. “That was a bad example. I don’t need help in that way. Hygienic ways, I mean. I just need someone to do some housework. What do you think?”

“I’m actually pretty busy,” Peter began, but the old man cut him off.

“I’ll pay you fifty dollars an hour.”

Peter thought then of a girl with too many freckles and a lazy eye that showed if she turned her head all the way to the left. Her name was Rena, and she’d left Kansas only five days before to start a wilderness conservation program in Montana. She would be working in Yellowstone—a place Peter had only seen on postcards and in documentaries. She’d mentioned the program the winter before, as a sort of side note to a conversation they were having about national parks, but didn’t bring it up again until a week before she was set to leave. She said she didn’t tell him sooner because she didn’t want their relationship to become a ticking time bomb. “I didn’t want to think of everything as a matter of This is last time we’re together when it snows or This is the last time we’re together for your birthday.” She went on, listing all the lasts that had already occurred, unknowingly to Peter. “But you knew,” he told her. “You knew they were the last time.” And then the reality of what she was saying had hit him: she did not want to stay together. The conservation program was only five months long, stretching through the summer and part of the fall, but still she did not want to stay together. “I don’t know where I’ll be when it’s over,” she explained. “I don’t know if I’ll want to come back to Kansas.” “You mean me,” he said. “You don’t know if you’ll want to come back to me.” She’d frowned the kind of frown one gives a homeless person, the kind that says, “There’s nothing I can really do to help you.”