As if building the house wasn’t enough for her, Helen rose at dawn, buzzing, humming, learning, managing, bursting with good ideas that Karen and I didn’t want to hear about. She put a pot on to boil, then went to collect duck eggs, so the bottom boiled out of the pot while she’d already got onto another task, pulling bent nails from used lumber, or salting a hide. She culled cabbage leaves for sauerkraut, but uprooted the plants, killing them. She saved a deer stomach to make blood sausage, but then turned her attention to drying red clover, so the stomach went to black slime. She ricocheted back and forth between Appalachian apprentice and holier-than-thou outsider, casually slipping in shit she must have picked up from some college class, spouting opinion as fact. Of course she didn’t notice that Karen was the better builder. She wouldn’t even notice if the house fell down. Still, Karen and I wanted what most people want, to harvest and eat our own asparagus. If you eat the raw shoots in the springtime, your blood thickens like a warrior, is what my grandma told me.

By the end of summer, the three of us were so tired at the end of the day’s work that we no longer cooked meals together. We ate separate sandwiches and went to sleep. We’d stopped making toasts. We’d run out of wine and gin. We didn’t buy more. We tried not to buy anything. We still hadn’t talked about money. In town, I dodged Deirdre and Janice so I wouldn’t have to tell them, Soon, soon, about that last month of rent. My boss at the hardware store said my job was still mine when I wanted it, and I held that in the back of my mind. After work hours, Helen disappeared up into the woods to gather food, and she came back with baskets full of dusty and dark plants, buckets of fur and feathers, flesh and intestine. The first few times, she invited Karen to come with her, but Karen declined. One evening at twilight, as Karen and I silently ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Helen strode into camp with two squirrels slung over her shoulder.

“Figured you might be hungry,” she said, letting her squirrels drop onto the pallet she used for processing. “I haven’t seen either one of you buy groceries in a while.” Karen squeezed her sandwich crust.

“We need to save money if we’re going to be able to finish the house by winter,” I said. Since we’d arrived, it was the first time that word—money—had been spoken aloud.

“Don’t worry, I’m happy to feed you,” Helen said, and that was what finally did it. That’s what brought Karen back to herself.