I could hear Lobo’s voice saying these things in my head. But what was the danger now? The plants were gone; I had shipped them off. Harvested myself, done the finger-cramping work of trimming alone, though I could have hired waitresses from town—Lobo liked to use girls because our hands were small and quick, and waitresses always need money, he said. I had carefully hung the plants, cut in Y-shapes, onto clotheslines strung around the farmhouse to dry. For days, the house had smelled heady and dewy, like a fairy kingdom. I had weighed and spilled the piles into brown paper grocery bags. The bags felt so light—it was part of the magic feeling; money from nothing—the weed was almost weightless.

But a nothing worth thousands of dollars.

Still, Lobo would have been angry that I had forgotten what our lives were like. What we could and could not do.

I parked the truck in the lower field by my tiny house, and unloaded the groceries and supplies. The house was built on a trailer Lobo had bartered off some guy for clones. He and Mama had liked the thought that the house could be hitched up to a truck and moved. When Mama and I had lived here, he had liked the idea that he could inch us ever closer. When I stayed on in the shack alone, she liked the idea that I could go.

But in all those years, the house on wheels had never moved.

Weeds had grown and died around the hitch, which was rusted. Some of the wheels looked stuck in mud, though I had kept the wheels full of air, at my mama’s insistence. Frozen, mud was becoming another substance entirely: solid, unforgiving as stone. You could crack your teeth on it. We used to have mud season in the holler, when the snow thawed and the river and the creeks swelled their banks.

Back then, mud was an annoyance. Mud got everywhere, drying, then crumbling on the truck floorboards, spackling my hair, sucking down my boots. Sometimes, in the kinds of springs we used to have, I felt I could taste mud in my teeth.

But we had never before had such hardness, such cruelty, from mud.

Inside the narrow entrance of my house, I took off my gloves. Not a lot of room left in the nooks and cabinets for the extra supplies. My eyes fell on the pile of mail I had dumped on a shelf and ignored the day that Lisbeth had called, telling me she was leaving. I had ignored a lot since then. Now I sifted through it. Junk, bills—those were still coming; despite the weather, companies still expected to be paid—a catalog, a postcard.