“But he’s only seven. He’s too young to live alone,” I said.

“He’s not living alone,” Helen said. “The camper’s just up the hill. He’s nearby. Look at it this way. He finally has his own room.”

“Dignity of risk,” Karen said. “It’s something we talked about in nursing school. Your duty to care for someone doesn’t outweigh their right to be their own person.”

Under my jacket, my shirt was wet, under my shirt my breasts were tight and hard. I managed three more spoonfuls of oatmeal, then went inside the house. I dug my way through the junk museum until I found a bowl and my secret store of brown sugar, hidden inside a box of powdered milk. Outside, Karen and Helen were talking snakes.

“Snakes eat mice but what eats snakes?” asked Karen.

“Snakes are actually pretty good eating if you kill them right and don’t make a mess,” Helen said.

“Hey, if you cook it I’ll eat it,” Karen said. Not since the invention of Survival Dice had the two of them been so happy together. I slipped the sugar inside my jacket, and I took the rest of the oatmeal up the hill.

Rudy waited at the camper door, sitting on an upturned bucket. At his feet were two lemons, a taproot, an elderberry stem hollowed into beads and strung together, a glass jar of crystals, and a hot-pink plastic dream catcher.

“Helen told me what happened,” he said. “So I brought my cures. Some of them I’ve tried, some of them I haven’t. Some of them work, some of them don’t exactly not work. I knocked on the door, but Perley told me I have to know the password if I want to go in.”

“Perley,” I called. “I brought oatmeal.” The small window above the bed slid open, and Perley stuck his head out.

“Does it have sugar on it?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said, handing in the bowl.

“Damn,” Rudy said, taking a good look at him. “You look like a pirate lost his eye patch. Now you’ll finally get some respect.”

“You think so?” Perley asked.

“Let me come in and show you my cures,” Rudy said.

“I told you. You have to know the password,” Perley said.

“Well, what is it?” asked Rudy.

“I don’t know,” Perley said. “I haven’t invented it yet.”

I picked up the dream catcher, hot pink, emerald-green feathers stuck on with glue. “What we could really use help with is getting rid of the snakes,” I told Rudy.

“Good fucking luck,” Rudy said. “I know a woman gave her house to the snakes and built another one.”

“We’ve got to get rid of them so that Perley can move back into the main house,” I said.

“I’m not moving back in,” Perley said. “I’m free and independent now as a human man.”