A subterranean longing would pass through me at those moments, a sharp, wrenching desire for wholeness, for the correct way of living. When I saw it up close it didn’t seem funny, or lame, or maudlin. It wasn’t anything but beautiful. Whenever I witnessed these moments of domestic perfection, the things that good people were born into, I had an odd feeling that I was floating somewhere beyond myself, in a far corner, watching my heart grasp at the scene like a drowning person inches away from a life jacket, clutching at the water of love, ecstatic and terrified.

Until this time in my life, with the exceptions of my parents’ deaths, library books, and a brief high school association I’d had with a boy more concerned with professional wrestling than romance, I had little understanding of how the larger world worked. Death and the wisdom of Bret “the Hitman” Hart were the extent of my lived experience. In many ways I was like a child, and I experienced Christmas at the Scheeles’ as a child: it was brand new to me, imitative of nothing, and it imprinted upon my heart the sincerest wish of any happy child who knows she is happy—that nothing would ever change.

But then the holiday would end, and life would resume. After I sold my mother’s house I had more money than I knew what to do with, and when I mentioned that I was looking for an apartment at work one day, Jim suggested buying a trailer, and offered to help me figure out the financing. I could have figured it out myself, but I let him help me. I loved sitting at their kitchen table, or standing around in the market during a lull, looking at paperwork and listening to him talk like he was the expert. I liked how his advice was quiet and simple, yet carried total authority, and that his creased forehead and deep hmm’s signaled hard and earnest concentration. He liked being useful, and I liked making him feel useful.

When I finished signing all the papers for the trailer, and after he and Geannie helped me repaint it and move some spare furniture in, the toilet stopped flushing on my second night there. And after he took me into town the next day to get a new toilet, and after he installed it and checked the pipes before finally declaring that everything was fine, he left, and I missed him. I sometimes sat in my living room and considered breaking something on purpose. I wanted to give him the opportunity to come over, exert his masculine know-how upon it.

Occasionally I did that, but not too often. Once, when I was feeling particularly lonely, I unscrewed a pipe under the kitchen sink so that it leaked slightly, and another time I cut the outside wire to my telephone. I enjoyed watching him stand around and quietly assess a problem, putting a name to it and sorting it out. I liked giving him that gift.