The main house was straight ahead. It was much smaller than the studio, and even more run-down, in that charming old Mill Valley sort of way. The paint was chipped and I could see some dry rot in the window frames, but jasmine vines stretched and crawled up the front-facing wall, scenting the air wafting in through my open window.

A large garage sat to the left of the main house, and after I parked my truck I wandered over to check it out. The door was padlocked, the windows were all covered up and I couldn’t see inside, but Rae had mentioned that the top floor was the apartment where I could live if I got the job. I walked up the staircase attached to the north side of the building and tried the door. It was locked, but the blinds were up. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered in the window. The apartment was one big room, the size of the oversize garage beneath it. A wrought-iron bed covered in a striped camping blanket was pushed against the sidewall. A leather couch that looked as soft and worn as my brother’s old baseball mitt sat below the front window, and a storage chest acting as a coffee table sat in front of that. The little kitchen looked to be in the back, on the other side of the bed, and there was a door I assumed led to a bathroom behind that. The lofty redwoods that surrounded the garage cast the whole space in shadow and reminded me of a cabin that Bob, Sam, and I had stayed in on a trip to Mount Shasta when I was a kid.

My immediate gut reaction was that I could be happy there. A moment later I heard Rae call my name. And I knew it was Rae because she said, “Joe, yeah?”

I turned around to see her walking from the house toward the garage. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and waited for me to come down, one hand on her hip, a bag of what looked like trail mix dangling from the other. She grabbed a couple of nuts, plopped them into her mouth, and pointed over her left shoulder. “October’s studio is there.”

Rae was younger than I’d imagined. Not a day over thirty, of what I guessed to be Japanese descent, with hair dyed a color that was either gray or lavender depending on how the light hit it. She was wearing a heavy black skirt that dragged on the ground when she walked, though the way she moved was more like a shuffle.

“You look too small to build houses,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was accusing me of something or trying to make a joke. She put another handful of what I could now see were almonds and raisins in her mouth and headed toward the studio, scuffling across the gravel as if she weren’t lifting her feet at all.