First ride I got was from a tanker truck driver. He said he was going all the way south with gallons of oil field waste to inject underground in our valley. It was 2:00 a.m. when we made Muskingum County. He could have taken me all the way home that night. But I asked him to drop me off near the river, the one they say people used to cross to get to freedom. Figured I’d have a look around.

17

LILY

So many false thaws, I didn’t believe in spring that year until the asparagus. Every morning in April new spears, green, purple, and white. I broke them off and brought them to Perley at Pariah Park. We gnawed and knitted and hoped for superhuman strength. In six days it would be the ninety-day review.

I wasn’t sure how much Perley knew, and I didn’t want him to be nervous. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up, and most of all I didn’t want to let him down ever again. Our new project was going so well, what was the use of reminding him that we weren’t in control of everything?

But in my breast pocket, the reunification plan was soft and worn, pressed open and refolded again and again, marked and underlined, lists made in the margins. The house gleamed. The dice were gone. I’d done everything I could do to prepare, but everything I could do still wasn’t a septic system, and everything I could do didn’t account for the snakes.

Which had come back in force now that it was spring.

The snake behind the woodstove, the snake among the dish towels, the snake in the drawer with the rolling pin and the measuring cups, the snake on the bookshelf, the snake behind the sofa, they were all there, faithful as the redbud and dogwood, the fleabane and mayapple. As fast as I shoveled them outside, they returned, sunning themselves beneath the windows like satisfied cats.

If it had been a hard winter for everyone, it had been a hard winter for Helen, too. I knew it hurt her when I tackled the reunification plan on my own. I knew she wanted to know what I was up to with the plastic eggs, with the piles of yarn. She always wanted to be central to any plan. She’d probably figured that with Karen gone, she and I would become an unstoppable duo. But when Karen had left, I’d discovered that acting alone was the only way I could act. I couldn’t expect Helen to understand it. And then when that lawyer passed, it knocked something out of her. She was the one who found him. She didn’t say much to me about it, but for weeks, she didn’t come home. She didn’t say where she was sleeping. When she finally wandered into the kitchen one morning, looking sick and distracted, I thought I had the perfect thing to offer her, to bring her back to herself. I finally needed her.