But today, everything was beautiful.

Early in the morning, the rev and cough and dying sputter of a chainsaw. Anouk pulled herself out of bed and went to her window and there was Red, standing by the house in a hover of bluish fumes. He pressed the body of the saw against his side and wrenched the cord. The motor started again, cutting savagely into the soft morning. It was a little after 7 a.m. She turned from the window just as Red lifted the saw to a lower bough of the biggest tree in their yard.

In the kitchen, she swallowed her pills and inhaled her steroids. While she waited for the steroids to work, she tidied the kitchen, her days like a jigsaw puzzle, slotting life into meticulous curves and divots between treatments. Her dad must have cooked for himself late at night because there was a sauce-crusted pot on the stove and a bowl full of pasta in the sink, a half-mown ear of corn. Greasy residue on the cutting board, and the newspaper she’d left out and opened to the page that carried her piece, untouched. There was a dirty cup and plate of orange peels on the table, and she cleared this up too while her coffee brewed.

A firefly of worry there. A recognition that lately, over the last few months, there was a carelessness to the way her father did things.

She took her cup outside and walked around the house to where Red now stood in a dune of golden sawdust, the air thick with the rich smell of freshly cut wood. The saw whined to a crescendo as another bough fell from the tree. He didn’t seem to know she was there and so she waited a while, watched him brace under the weight of the saw, the upper bones in his back jabbing at his thin plaid shirt. Without her noticing he had become smaller, and she wondered how this could happen. He switched off the saw and put it on the ground and shook out his arms, lifted a pair of plastic goggles from his face and settled them on the top of his head. His face was marked red with the impression of the shape of the goggles.

‘Why are you cutting the tree?’ she asked. This was the tree, she remembered, he was going to get rid of years before, around the time Nora left.

‘I like the smell,’ he said.

‘You’re cutting it because you like the smell?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to cut the whole thing down?’

‘Just these lower branches. Lets more sun into the house.’ Sweat dripped from his nose and he wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.

When Anouk came back into the kitchen after doing her physio, for which she now used a tight, motorized vest which shook and agitated her chest to dislodge the mucus from her lungs (The Cheese now relegated to the shed, too sentimental a piece to throw away), Fraser and Red were sitting together at the table, both with plates of eggs and bacon, both with a bottle of beer.