At Pete’s invitation they ended up lodging at the farmhouse, paired up in two of the upstairs bedrooms. These bore faint traces of refurnishings, rewirings, recarpetings, and rewallpaperings beyond count. The most recent wave had apparently been aimed at getting the place back to some kind of historical condition thought of as pure: hardwood floors reexposed and finished, layers of paint scraped off the heavy door trim, wallpaper stripped all the way down to the original horsehair plaster, light fixtures and doorknobs that had either spent most of a century piled in a hayloft or been painstakingly manufactured to look that way. Sophia didn’t have the talents or the sensibilities of a decorator, but she knew her critical theory, and as she lay awake on the iron bunk bed—now upgraded with an extra-firm Gomer Bolstrood mattress that had probably been slept on all of half a dozen times—she wondered about the way of thinking that held this one particular era of the house’s history to be somehow canonical: the logical end state to which it ought to be returned and in which it then ought to be preserved by the flawed machine of Richard Forthrast’s last will and testament. Between when it had first looked thus and the moment, a few years ago, when it had been returned to the same state, it had passed through who could guess how many intermediate phases of interior decoration. Almost all of these had been devoted to covering up—literally papering over—the simple bare rustic character that had now been expensively reinstated. Probably those decorators—various generations of Forthrast moms—had seen it as embarrassing and had sought to expunge it from their visual environments while spending as little money as possible.

When Karen—Pete’s wife, and now the chatelaine—had been assigning them to beds on the way back from Applebee’s, she had quite naturally and reasonably assumed that Sophia would want to sleep in Patricia’s former bedroom. Patricia had been the only girl in the generation that had included Alice’s husband, John; Sophia’s uncle Richard; and Jake, the straggler, the only one still living. Naturally John and Dodge had bunked in one room so that Patricia could have her own: a small, cozy third-story attic build-out with sloping walls. Upon reaching adulthood, getting married, and discovering that she was infertile, Patricia and her worthless husband had adopted Zula—Sophia’s mother—from Eritrea. The husband had gone on the lam and was no longer spoken of. Patricia had then died young in a freak accident. Zula had been raised by John and Alice, with Richard always hovering around the edges as a favored, cool, transgressive uncle. She’d ended up in Seattle, employed by Richard’s company. They had become close. Thus, when Sophia had been tiny, Richard had been her uncle/granddad. She still had memories of sitting on his lap reading books.