They just smile. Up close, Jo has a knowing look, a canniness that Inger lacks. But Inger doesn’t need to be knowing, as far as I can tell. A Minnesota heiress with dairymaid braids and a lineless tan, she’s like something you’d make up, and she treats the world like something she made up. We hear from her only when she’ll be in Utah or when she wants us to go with her somewhere else. She stretches her arms over her head, in a man’s white undershirt. Jo thinks there’s something permanently unfinished about Inger—like the missing “id” of her name, though I guess it’s not an id that’s missing—and that’s why she’s never with a man very long; there’s an absence in her that doesn’t seem to need filling, or that other people can’t fill.

“Inger’s going to pull burdock with you,” Jo says. “I have to write up my bird reports.”

“I want to,” Inger says, before I can say she doesn’t have to.

They both climb out of their sleeping bags, and I watch the top of Jo’s head while she rummages in a dry box. Her hair has dulled, and her shoulders look thin. She digs out canvas work gloves for Inger, and I can tell movement costs her; she moves slow. When I described the changes to my father on the phone, he said it might be anemia and the climate, and to make sure she had iron and water.

Inger dresses and we pull burdock all morning, piling it to burn when it’s dry. I want to ask her about Jo, about what they were saying, but I don’t. The work is hypnotic: grab the plant low, yank it out, shake soil off the roots, throw it on the pile. It’s hard to measure time when the sun feels like it’s not moving, shining hot on your back.

“Jo loves you,” Inger says, right next to me, out of the blue.

I hadn’t realized she was so close. Her T-shirt is off, tucked into the back of her shorts, and she struggles with a waist-high plant until it comes out at the root, sending her a few steps backward. She tosses the weed on the pile. Her chest and throat are shiny with beads of sweat, dark against her white bra. I give her my water bottle and she lifts her braids to pour it over the back of her neck and her throat, the white sticking to her breasts in pink rivulets where the water runs down.