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.

But when I showed her the snake ritual, carefully recorded in Perley’s awkward hand, she glanced over it, then handed the comic book back to me. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sounds hokey. Sounds like more stealing from the Native Americans.”

“This isn’t some new-age crap,” I said. “This is the kind of shit my grandma said her Irish grandma did when she wasn’t praying the rosary.”

“You don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know either,” I said. “What I’m wondering is, what if it works?”

She took the book back from me, looked at it again.

“Why do you need my help?” she asked. “It seems like you’ve been making out just fine without me lately.” I might have resisted such fishing, but for once my own need met hers.

“Even if I could eat one snake,” I said, “I could hardly eat two. And anyway, you’re the one knows how to skin them and clean them.”

When I mentioned eating snakes, Helen looked green and shut her mouth quick. When I mentioned skinning and cleaning them, she said, “When we met, you and Karen were the ones showing me how to butcher animals.”

“Seems like we’ve switched places,” I said. She smiled, satisfied that I’d say so.

“It’s easy,” she said. “It’s like cleaning a fish.”

“If it’s so easy,” I said, “it’ll be easy for you to do it.”

“We’ll do it together,” she said.