Oh lord, Helen was hard to take, barreling in from some West Coast city with her college degree, not knowing a thing, needing our help, then emerging after a hard winter a self-styled sourdough, flaunting her newfound skills to us, who’d always lived here. I could see Karen weighing the whole force of Helen against the possibility of providing for our family. Her bootheel rapped the floor. It could fail, of course it could. But what Karen liked best was a project likely to fail. My love never could resist difficulty, and I never could resist her.

Karen looked at me. “Well, Lily?” she asked. “What do you want to do?” But it wasn’t a matter of what I wanted to do. I’d already synchronized myself like a watch to her desire. Perley searched Karen’s thigh for a place to nurse, so she scooped him over to me with one hand because he was that small. I took his nothing weight and I held my left breast like feeding my boy a sandwich. Karen was ready, and I was ready to please her. I agreed to throw our lot in with Helen Conley.

Perley was three months old in April, when we moved to Helen’s land. Three months old, holding his head up, demanding to be held facing forward so that he wouldn’t miss a thing. We didn’t bring much with us because we didn’t have much to bring. All our clothes and all Perley’s diapers fit into two big garbage bags. Besides that, we brought Karen’s toolbox, brimming with chisels. Our rubber boots. A splitting axe and a hatchet. Two shovels, one flat-bottomed, one sharp. The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, by J. I. Rodale and Staff, 1970 edition. Karen’s stack of ElfQuest. Packed it all easily into one truckload and drove the five miles to Helen’s place and confronted the long driveway, and at the top was Helen, eager and trying to hide it.