Before you have a kid, life is full of work that ends. But your kid is born, and that’s it. There’s no off hours. It just goes and goes. You’d better hope there’s no end. In the seven years since Perley had been born, the work of my life was nothing much, just to get my boy through his day, food, clothes, ailments, snakebites, hurt feelings, unanswerable and relentless questions. Each morning I woke up ready. I was a parent. I was always ready. And now that was over. That’s what it is to lose a child. There’s no one to care for. There’s nothing to do. The work just stops.

Helen, Karen, Rudy, these people were bargainers, grasping for anything they’d give us. Two weeks. Ninety days. One year. For me it was all or nothing. So for a while there, I admit, it was nothing. I refused to put numbers on the days. I let time go by. I turned and turned in bed alone. I turned away from strategy and action. I turned toward that word: unfit. I was pincushion and pins, sticking myself once for each mistake, turning porcupine.

One morning, Karen came to the door. She thought I didn’t know but I knew. I heard her stack wood. I heard her stand outside. I heard her not knock. I waited her out. I knew when she left. I went outside to pee and I found her note sitting on top of the woodpile, stuck to the tarp with a button cap.

She wrote, I’m leaving. She wrote, I found work. She wrote, I’m leaving because it’s the only way that you and me and Perley can be a family again.

I knew how her mind worked. I knew she was trying to pass this off as pack leadership. Maybe she could fool herself, but she couldn’t fool me. She was running. The stranger in her had finally won out over the wolf pack. I knew where she was going. Where did anyone in our hills go when they ran out of options? They joined one of the crews in the oil fields up north, drilling or pipelining or wherever the jobs were that season. They called them rat crews because they weren’t union and they’d do just about anything to get the job done. They lived in one of the camps that were all men, the boomtowns that sprang up, and they made money and sometimes they got sick or had accidents or did things they weren’t proud of, and people said it was dangerous to be a woman up there, but woman or man, they always made money. They always came home with money.

She wrote, I’m leaving so that I can come back.