The kitchen opens onto the family room, the rooms themselves separated only by the wide counter where Ruth stands. She looks up over the counter and into the other room, where her daughter sits at the table, her head bent low over her sketchbook, a pencil clutched firmly in her hand. She looks stern with concentration, and Ruth can tell by the whiteness of her fingertips that she is pressing the pencil hard against the page. She is framed by the picture window, and her silhouette is dark against the sky behind her, its steely canvas broken only by the jagged limbs of the apple tree, Ruth’s favorite. Bare long before the other trees this fall, the apple tree is dying, Ruth knows. Wilson wanted to cut it down, but she wouldn’t let him.

“It’s dead, Ruth,” he’d said.

“It’s not dead,” she’d said. “It’s dying. Let’s just let it die.”

The winter will kill it, she suspects. It’s meant to be a bad one.

“Do you know what my mother said to me on her deathbed?” Ruth asks, flaking the onion’s skin away. “I asked her, I said, ‘Mother, what am I going to do about Jimmy?’ And she looked at me, and she smiled, and she said, ‘Ruthie, I don’t know, but he is your problem now.’ And, my God, words have never been truer.” She picks the knife back up and holds it above the onion, then she pauses. “I’m just not quite sure what I’m supposed to do.” She lowers the knife onto the onion. “What do I say about thirty-six black helicopters, for instance? Do I say I see them, too? That everyone does? Or do I tell him he’s delusional?”

Ruth steps back from the onion to dry her eyes. Isabelle has not looked up. A large pot of water on the stove has finally come to a boil, and Ruth pours several bags of split peas in. “There,” she says. “That should last us for a couple months at least. Maybe even all winter. Though I’d like to make lentil, too, at some point.” She turns back to the cutting board. Her daughter hunches over her sketchbook, very still except for the slow and deliberate movements of her drawing hand.

“I’d like to see what you’re drawing, Isabelle,” Ruth says. “When you’re finished, if you want to show me.”