“I’m just passing on what the mailman told me,” Rudy said. “All I know for sure is that the pipeline’s a good place for fruit trees until I get something else figured out.” He swung back and pitched his line, with its yellow weighted pouch, toward the uppermost branches of the spruce. The pouch missed its mark and plummeted back down to us. Rudy backed up and tried again.

In those first years, I had turned to Karen and Lily as a respite from Rudy, but the longer I lived with them, the more my time with Rudy had become its own sort of relief. At least with Rudy I could put my ear protection on and shut up. I could let him do the talking. At home, there was no rest. When I had something to say, I said it. I said it until I was hoarse.

I knew a snake slept in the bed with Karen, Lily, and Perley. I knew black snakes didn’t bite, but still, it didn’t seem quite safe. We couldn’t agree long enough to get rid of it. Perley had begun school and become secretive and pale, chatting to himself and laughing at nothing, spending hours alone in the woods, yet insisting each morning on hiking down the driveway on his own to get on that school bus. Nothing could stop him. Karen and Lily were at odds over it. As usual, no one listened to me.

As usual, my wild foods were keeping us alive. I worked all day with Rudy, then came home to send Perley up into the oak trees. He’d shake the branches so that the acorns rapped my hard head. We aimed to collect at least a hundred gallons that year.

Karen and Lily, absorbed in Perley and in each other, for once didn’t object, when I mentioned that Rudy might tend his trees out on the pipeline. “As long as he doesn’t think he’s going to live out there,” Karen said.

“Of course not,” I said.

“I don’t care to see him sweating out his hangover at my breakfast table,” Karen said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only temporary.”

As for my Best Practices Binder, I was the only one who ever brushed aside the cobwebs and mouse shit, opened the cover, and added to it: acorns, buckets, chain saws, fruit trees.