Helen looked hurt. “It’s helpful,” she said. “It has everything in it.” She held it out to me.

Reluctantly, I took the binder, opened it to the first page, which read, “A Compendium of Helpful Strategies and Methods for Optimum Daily Living.” Karen set aside her whittling and came to look over my shoulder. Perley kept up his sofa exercises, making what he thought of as the sound of a motor.

“Optimum?” Karen said. “Where do you get this shit?”

I turned the page.

The Best Practices Binder seemed at first to be a how-to-homestead guide, an imitation of the books that Helen had studied. There was a page about the proper procurement of roadkill. Best to get a deer that wasn’t there when you went into town, but appeared on your way back out. That way you know exactly how long it’s been lying there. There were instructions on how to kill tree of heaven. Don’t bother trying to uproot it or cut it down. Instead, scrape its bark off in a circle all the way around the trunk. There was a page about duck slaughtering, a page of notes on knife sharpening. Drawings of edible mushroom varieties, with notes about each one. Look for morels in the creek beds, near clusters of mayapples. Oyster mushrooms smell like anise, can be found along aspen logs. A page about acorn gathering: Two fifty-five-gallon barrels should get a family of four through the winter, but just barely. For higher calorie count, gather the acorns from the ground so that you get the ones with grubs in them. Kindling: Preferably poplar or ash, never elm, never red oak. Firewood: Remember that the old-timers brought in wood two years ahead of when they planned to burn it. There was a recipe for pickling nasturtium seed, a diagram of an effective drainage ditch, rocks and pebbles lined up according to size. Helen had done it all on lined notebook paper in a tidy cursive hand.

“Useful,” I admitted, but Karen tapped her foot, annoyed.