“But we haven’t been to the grocery store in two weeks,” I said, thinking of the single box of macaroni on the shelf, the five-pound bag of oats, the half loaf of stale bread, the jar of peanut butter dwindling each day. “We don’t have the money for it. Maybe one of us should go back to work soon.”

“No time to go back to work. We’ve got to build the house. And Perley needs us here,” Karen said.

“Anyway, I’ve got money,” Helen said.

“You do?” I asked.

“I saved plenty of money working for Rudy last year,” she said. “He wanted me back this season, too, but I told him not until the house is finished.”

“You have money?” I asked. My stomach felt vacuumed clean.

“We don’t need Helen’s money,” Karen said.

“It’s not about that,” Helen said.

“It’s about practicing and preparing,” Karen said.

“Right,” Helen said. “We can do better. We can certainly do better than we’ve been doing.”

“If one of us has money, then I think we should go to the grocery store,” I said. “I’m hungry. We’re almost out of peanut butter.”

“But what if there was no grocery store? That’s the point,” Karen said.

“I wonder how long we’d last,” Helen said.

“I’m breastfeeding, Karen,” I said.

“But what would we do if you were breastfeeding and there was no grocery store?” Karen said. “That’s what we need to be thinking about.” Helen nodded.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll go to the store tomorrow. Let’s make a grocery list.”

“Lily, stop it. You don’t have to go to the store,” Karen said.

“Okay, you can go,” I said. “I don’t care who goes. Why don’t we rock paper scissors to see who goes? Or we can roll the dice.”

“That’s it!” Helen said. “We’ll roll the dice.” With relief, I watched her produce the pouch of dice from where we stored it in the toolbox. She emptied the four dice into her hand. I was already picturing bread all squishy in its plastic bag, a brick of cheese, maybe even butter and milk, cold cuts, when Helen said, “From now on, when it’s time to go grocery shopping, we roll the dice. If we roll doubles, we go to the grocery store. If not, we subsist on what we have stored, and what we can get from this land.”