Pushing forty, and suddenly I knew what it meant to give someone the eye. For all his swagger, Rudy was essentially a prude, and maybe I was, too. Maybe we both could have taken tips from Aldi Birch, the old goat. Aldi knew how to admire me, was the first person to admire me in a long time. I could tell the way that I bewildered Aldi Birch was what he liked, and I liked bewildering him. None of it made sense. I mean he was old, one might even say infirm. He was not attractive, not in any conventional sense. But what was I? A braided rope. A well-seasoned tarp. Aldi looked at me. I imagined myself near him and then I was near him.

For Rudy, my ground work tended to be hurry up and wait. While I waited, I began to do things for Aldi, small things. Two days into the job, more broiler chicks were delivered. I helped Aldi carry the box into the garage, watched while he sliced open the lid. Inside, the chicks massed. Aldi and I knelt shoulder to shoulder, scooping one chick after another under the heat lamps. One at a time, I dipped their minute beaks in a pan of water, then set them in the fresh sawdust Aldi laid down.

Aldi was gentle with me. He patted me on the thigh and for some reason I didn’t mind it. I touched him and he wasn’t embarrassed. When I say I touched him, I mean that I helped him up from his chair. Or I rubbed his diabetic feet. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I want to,” I said, and I did. Always, I could tell he had pain, and not just the physical kind.

Rudy may not have liked it, but Rudy was up in the oak.

Many evenings, we’d stay on after the work was done. No reason not to, I told myself, not much waiting for me at home. When Karen had been there, it always seemed that Lily was the one I’d rather be on a desert island with. But now that she and I were on that desert island, I found it hard going. I can’t say that I missed Karen, but I can say that she made more sense to me than Lily did, even if Lily had decided to stop maundering and start cleaning. With her knitting and unraveling, her collection of plastic eggs, her glassy eyes, Lily hadn’t saved a place for me. She hadn’t even asked me to help her work through the reunification plan. I’d been trying to help her for years, and now it seemed she’d found a way to help herself. Well, good for her if she didn’t need me anymore.