Grayson told me he lived in the rolling ridges on the other side of the county. I knew the place. We had lived there ourselves for a few years right before and after my daddy left. The houses were brown and forgettable. A lot of duplexes. Ours had smelled of mildew. On some nights, when the wind blew a certain way, it seemed like the house had a sharpness, a bitterness I could breathe.

Maybe it was my parents’ fights. Even after my daddy had gone, anger had a way of hanging around: sulking past the corners, down the drab carpeted hall. Disappointment lingered in the doorways, like smoke or a ghost.

“Do you like living here?” I asked Grayson. I didn’t tell him about my old house. I hoped we didn’t pass it. I didn’t want to see it again.

“It’s okay. My allergies are bad around here. The Church was trying to help with that.”

“The Church?” I looked over at him.

Grayson pointed. “It’s right there.”

I pulled into a driveway before a house, indistinguishable from all the other houses. The lawn looked neglected, the grass matted and pale where it showed through snow. When we got out of the truck, I noticed most of the houses had patchy lawns. The cold had killed them, or the homeowners had given up. Newspapers piled on the porch of the neighbor’s place. I thought of Lisbeth’s house. Had they sold it, rented it? Was their porch filling up with snow?

On the farm, we didn’t pretend that we lived anywhere nice. Lobo barely mowed the grass, just a strip by the vegetable patch that he let get thick and high before he wrestled with it, and he only bothered so we could access the tomatoes. Most of the land had grown up into jewelweed, poverty grass, and thorns, gone its own wild way. The farmhouses looked like toys out in the country, dotted on the landscape, tiny pieces on a complex board game. Sometimes I used to comfort myself with the fact that if we let it go, left it all behind, nature would just take it back, bust weeds through the windows, shoot Virginia creeper down the halls. That was back when we had a summer.

We had reached the front door of Grayson’s place. I had helped him up the walk. He removed his arm from around my shoulders and said: “Thanks. This is good. Thanks for your help.”

“Are you sure you want me to go? You should at least take some of those vitamins with you.”

“That’s okay. Thanks. I feel like an idiot.”

“Well, do you still need wood?” Then I stopped, because Grayson had gotten the door open, and it had opened wider than he had intended, unveiling a dim and claustrophobic living room.