First thing, he led Peter to the kitchen and gave him a can of Old Style.

“I’ve always liked it out here,” Peter said, looking around and sipping his beer. A stained glass window cast a box of red and purple light onto the hardwood floor between them. On the wall hung a poster of a naked woman riding a camel. It read: SMOKING IS SEXY.

Deschutes shrugged. “It can be nice anywhere, if you get the conditions right.”

“But some places are nicer than others. By default.”

“That’s a myth told by the people who think they’re unhappy because of where they are and not who they are. You ever lived outside Kansas?”

Peter thought of Rena and drank more beer. “No. Not yet.”

“Well, you’ll see.”

Peter held his tongue and wondered if the old man was counting this as paid time. “So what’s first on the agenda?” he asked.

Deschutes gestured for Peter to follow him. He went out the kitchen and up a skinny flight of stairs that creaked the whole way. The stairs opened up to a room that was all windows. Peter assumed it had once been a sleeping porch. He pictured turn-of-the-century children climbing into bed, a row of sheer white curtains inflating like the sails of ships. Now, the room smelled stale and the windows were painted shut, the glass frosted and cracked. The only wall without windows boasted a blank canvas. Scattered across the floor were dozens of charcoal portraits, all of a woman with big lips and small breasts: Slinky.

“My studio,” Deschutes said, and went toward the far corner of the room, where one window met another. “You can see campus from here. Thought it would remind me that I’d escaped the academics.” He took a moment to clear something from his throat and then gestured to the portraits on the floor. “I’ll need you to pick the best one and put it on that canvas, if you don’t mind.”

Peter looked around, unsure whether he understood the old man right.

“Go ahead,” Deschutes said. “Pick which one you like best.”

Peter scanned the portraits at his feet. There were too many to consider all at once. In some, Slinky’s face filled the entire paper, her eyes the size of mangos. In others, she was far away—reclining on a sofa, wrapped in a shawl near a fire hydrant. There were traces of color, a splash of peach on her cheeks or a blur of green where her foot touched the earth.

“Go on,” Deschutes said. “Don’t be precious.”

“I thought I’d be doing housework. Cleaning. Or maybe mowing the lawn.”

“This is housework. We’re in my house. Painting is work. Remember, I’m paying you.”

Peter recalled a vision of Rena on a summer night the year before, her head in his lap as they lay on a quilt in a friend’s backyard, watching a group of neighborhood kids dart after fireflies. “We could have a kid one day,” she’d said, more as a revelation than a proposition. It had scared him at first, but then he’d gotten used to it, started imagining a little girl with Rena’s eyes. He could teach her how to draw. Rena could teach her how to garden.