I didn’t see anyone from Pine City because I returned to my bungalow only twice in five days: once for a bag of groceries and my toothbrush, and once to shower. I longed for someone to visit me, to break apart the solitude, but I knew everyone would leave me alone. If I wanted to see people, I’d have to go to the Mission, or Max’s house, or, I guess, the nearest bar, which I still hadn’t found, but if I was going out, then my work wasn’t getting done, so I camped out at the studio, jumping in the lake to shower, using the studio kitchen to make coffee and sandwiches, and passing out every night on the orange sofa with a drop cloth for a blanket.

I was an animal.

Terry from Pearl showed up midway. We unloaded outside—I didn’t want him to see what I was doing, because Terry delivered to everybody—and in the end I wound up giving him a hundred in cash and asking him directly to keep the delivery to himself. He agreed readily. It obviously wasn’t the first time he’d been asked for a little discretion.

It took an hour for me to drag everything inside. As I grabbed the final boxes, I heard a splash in the channel. Jes sat there, in a red plastic kayak, tapping her fingers along the paddle, snickering loudly. Though we made eye contact, I kept unloading as though I hadn’t seen her, as though everything I was unloading was a perfectly normal amount for one single painting. By the time I finished, she’d paddled away. I returned to the studio, panicked. How much did she see?

Jes did not like me. She had no reason to keep my secret—in fact I suspected that she would be delighted to see me fail. Still—Tyler liked me, I thought, and so did Marlin, and Jack—I could get Jack to like me, if I tried hard enough. If I appealed to the unit, I didn’t think Jes would throw it out of balance. I resolved to stay out of her way.

Next: flip the panels onto their framing. After that: gesso, forty-eight coats, with sanding between, followed by lattices to cut out of two-ply. To keep track of what belonged where, I let myself paint a teensy, tiny bit, labeling the panels and the sawhorses: O1, O2, O3, O4, H1, H2, H3, H4, and so on.

Saran the paint bucket, Saran the brush. Stare down twenty-four sheets of two-ply and pencil in patterns you can barely recall.