Far off. A couple of miles off, at least. “Do you have someone you can call?”

He stretched his bad leg on the sofa, dropped his foot on the cushions with his muddy shoe still on, and then shook his head. “I saw some deer tracks, so I wandered off-trail.”

“Are you a hunter?” Of course, that wasn’t what hunters did, not good ones. If he was a hunter he might have a gun, but not one small enough to conceal in his backpack or at his side. He would have had to leave it behind in the woods.

“No, no.” He waved a hand. There was dirt settled into the lines of his palm. “No, you know, I’m not really anything. I just wanted to see some deer. Some wildlife, you know? My buddy said he saw a mountain lion up here.”

Mountain lions don’t go where people are, not unless they’re starving. They keep to their own. Even the sound of human voices frightens them.

“You won’t see a mountain lion.”

He gestured to his foot, baleful but still smiling, a gesture that said, Shucks, what can you do? “Probably won’t see any deer now either.”

“Can you call your buddy?”

He shook his head. “Went back to Florida a couple days ago. Hey, do you have any stronger painkillers?”

I would have told him that we didn’t, though we did have a few pills left over from Agnes’s wisdom tooth surgery two years ago. They might or might not have been expired, but in either case I didn’t want to give them to him. We might need them one day.

I would have told him this, except that then Agnes came home. Agnes moves like her own big cat, transferring her body slowly from step to step, nearly silent except that she sings. She sings songs first sung by rusty-voiced men: Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan. If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.

Arthur looked up at the sound of her voice, which anyone would have. Ill-suited to the songs she loves, Agnes has a voice like clear water passing through cloth. His eyebrows went up when he saw her. He shifted his jaw, as if tasting his own tongue in his mouth. Agnes stilled halfway through the door. He looked like a dirty old coat tossed over the back of our couch, like a dead lizard in our bathtub. Because I would have hated it, I braced for her to hate it.

“Who’s this?” I watched her eyes go over him, chronicling, leg braced up, mud on the couch, greasy hair flopped over his eyes.

I curled my lip. “He hurt himself.”

“My name’s Arthur.” He sat up, finally taking his white-wrapped ankle off the back of the couch. “I was hiking.”