“Fish. Hunt.”

“I mean, for work.”

“That’s right.”

I realized he was not the type to joke about matters of fishing or hunting. “You can live off that?”

“Sure—between meat and furs. I make all kinds of stuff from furs. And skins. If you make something, rest assured there’s some kook out there who’ll buy it. Learned that from the Internet. One time I made a doll out of horse hair. Just a little doll with pearl button eyes and a burlap dress. Some lady bought it off eBay for a hundred bucks. Said she only gave her baby organic, handcrafted toys. Can you even imagine a baby snuggling with a horsehair doll?”

“I had no idea there was a market for that kind of thing.”

“If you build it, they will come.”

Jackson turned off the air and cranked down the windows. Usually I didn’t like driving with the windows down—the wind tangled my hair and bothered my contacts. But in the truck I hung an arm out, feeling the invisible grooves in the air.

I’d gotten used to telling myself I didn’t want a man. My mother had summed it up the last time I called her crying about the ex: it was time for me to be alone, to be a single and independent woman with a bachelor’s degree and a one bedroom. I needed to learn to like myself, to enjoy my own company—something my mother feared she had never done. At least this was what I reminded myself as Jackson pulled up in front of my apartment.

He was looking at me, his car idling. “This is it, right?”

By now, enough time had passed that I could go inside and start cleaning the poison, but I didn’t want to give up on Jackson so easily. I was impatient to find out if we would sleep together. “This is it,” I told him. “But I forgot—I can’t go in.”

“Why not?”

“I’m bombing. For fleas.”

“Ahhh.” He nodded, as if I’d mentioned an old mutual friend. “The herpes of nature.”

“I’ve been drowning them in soap all week.”

“Well then,” he said, smiling. “What do you want to do?”

I shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t offer to drop me off somewhere else.

“Want to come to my place?” he asked.

The offer bloomed before me in a tableau of sweat and naked limbs. “Sure,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. “I could do that.”

“I live near Vinland. It’s about twenty minutes south. That okay?”

“That’s fine. I’ve never heard of it. Sounds like Finland.”

“Might as well be.” He cranked the radio, and we were off, leaving the tiny holocaust in my apartment behind.

We drove straight back to the country roads we’d just driven, passing fields of scorched grass punctuated by homes with wraparound porches and little man-made ponds that shone like nickels against the sun. Somewhere around the county line, I realized I’d forgotten to take my goldfish, Goldie Prawn, out of the apartment before I bug bombed. Had I been anywhere but in Jackson’s truck, I would have cried.