She nodded. “This is a good place,” she said. “The spring, the creek, the garden, the ducks. And the forest. We can stand on the ridge and only see one light. All that coal company land between us and them.”

“You want to stay,” I said.

“I want to stay,” she said. “Helen can say what she wants about things being equal. But you see how she is. She wants things her own way. Notice she hasn’t rushed to put our names on anything official. I’m not going to push it. Helen thinks she’s in charge, but if we play this right, we’ll still be right here after she burns out. I’ll fix what needs fixing later.” She managed to turn her nose from mine so that she faced the low ceiling. She removed her toe from my shin. “If you’ve got a better strategy,” she said, “then you can stand up to Helen yourself.”

But I never found a way to say word one to Helen, who, while gazing past us to the ridge beyond, had told us that we were her emergency phone number. That we were the people she’d call from jail if she had one phone call. That she loved us. She’d told us the story of where she came from. She’d always done what someone told her to, went to college when they told her to, wrote letters to one widowed aunt who didn’t understand why anyone would live without a man out of view of the Puget Sound, let alone live with those kind of people, by which she meant us. What kind of people are we? I asked. Not lesbians, Helen said. She’s not homophobic. Then what? I asked, but Karen said, She means rednecks, and Helen blushed. Helen said that when she’d been with Shane, her aunt was proud of them for striking out on their own. It seemed like a grand adventure. But now that she was single it was uncharted territory, she said, and to most people it just seemed unfortunate. The aunt sent her gifts, which she passed on to Perley: paints, bright slippers that were child-size, lip gloss that came in the shape of chocolate truffles. Helen said, It might be different if my uncle was still alive. Him, I could talk to. But my aunt is unaware that I’m a grown woman.