He gave me a long look, head to feet. I felt itchy, embarrassed. I thought about the spot on my face from the sun, and how broad I was, how calloused my hands, the bruises and cuts and burns all over from my many interactions with sheep and pine needles and large pans of frying greens, gates and fences, brambles. Isaac frowned—did he pity me?—and all my hard-won self-sufficiency seemed to drain away. “There are a few other reasons that I came,” he said.

I shrugged. “And I take it you didn’t tell Bay you knew me?” I said.

“Lindsay told me not to.” He put his face in my shoulder. I shuddered; I couldn’t stop thinking of danger, danger. “I like Bay,” Isaac said. “He gets me.”

I remembered sitting with Bay at the bus stop. Bay got everyone, I thought. “He’s amazing,” I said. “But wait till you meet Dice.”

He said, “After Lindsay told me about you, I went to see your mom.”

“You went to my house?” A year into our dating, Isaac first met my mother. He already didn’t like her. He thought she was a fool for loving novelties. At the time I enjoyed all his criticisms of her frivolity. But then, when they met, he surprised me by putting in effort. Isaac brought Bo-Berry biscuits and they sat in the kitchen, laughing till they cried.

He was with me when we found the broken-down shotgun in her drawer. Isaac seemed even nicer to her after that.

Isaac was so likeable. My mother wouldn’t like Bay, I reminded myself. She wouldn’t like Dice.

Isaac said, “I went to the knickknack store.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I said you were living in a community in the mountains.”

My tongue felt dry. “And what did she think?”

“She wasn’t happy, Berie. What did you expect?”

The blood buzzed in my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes you just have to go.” I thought, If he takes me, I’ll run. I’ll hitchhike back here.

“She knows that more than anyone,” he said. This surprised me. But here was how the years would roll on: I wouldn’t come home, and my mother would start to think that this had been my plan all along, this never-returning. All kinds of people had gently estranged relatives. She lived in the fake world, selling things no one needed, horse string lights, light-up globes, solar-powered light-up houses, ceiling-galaxy projectors, the three-inch levitating globe. Every morning when she got to work she’d flip fifty switches till the whole store glowed around her. Then she’d stand behind the counter, oversized in a cap-sleeve dress, like a figurine in a Christmas diorama. That was happiness, to her. She was part of the system that was killing off all the wilderness in the world. That was her life. It wouldn’t be mine.