The cheesemaker used vinegar instead of rennet in the curdling process, and therefore his cheese was suitable for vegetarians. To concentrate made her sweat. The harsh, white fug of the antibiotics. The front window was open a crack and, even with the cool air coming through the room, she was hot. But also she was cold. She kicked the blanket from her legs and listened to the sounds from outside. An airplane somewhere. Or maybe not. A streetcar. Always a streetcar. Birds. A strange crackling she couldn’t place.

In the autumn when Anouk was six years old, Jody, the guy with the chipped tooth, the guy who. Showed up to the house on the river with what looked like a wooden phone booth strapped upright in the back of his truck. It was an old ice-fishing shack that he’d repurposed into a sauna, and he wanted Anouk’s parents to try it out. He planted it on the sand next to the water and showed Red how to load the small, cast-iron oven with wood and heat the metal cask of stones. Anouk and Red spent the whole day in the sauna. She could remember, even now, the hot, wet smell of cedar. The beads of sweat falling from her dad’s beard, his rosy cheeks. Over and over, they ran between the sweltering sauna and the river, and the cold water was like music on the skin.

Now her legs bristled with the sensation of running through the sand, tiny pebbles grinding into her feet. Water travelled down the coiled rope of her long braid, dripping on to the backs of her thighs.

She touched her hair, dirty now, cut just below her ears.

That day. The movement of the river was reflected on the yellow undersides of maple leaves; the thick, resin scent of pine was everywhere, and Red was there was there was there. His hair, even when it was wet, maintained the ducktail moulded by his hat.

Red died in the beginning of October, a few weeks after Anouk’s nineteenth birthday, only months after he told her he was sick. In the hospital in Pembroke, during his last weeks, she watched her father disappear. The morphine made him do queer things, like pinch an imaginary joint to his mouth, which she had to pretend to light. Sometimes he called her Nora, or Mom. Anouk helped him drink water through a straw, and washed away the spit that coagulated to yellow paste at the corners of his mouth.