I got up quickly and banged my head. “Oh—a sock.”

“But you already have both on, silly!” she said.

* * *

The days were shortening, so we had to turn on the fluorescent lights in the milking parlor. The barn was thrumming from the generator, and the air smelled like exhaust and warm animals. I thought about my mother, if she had been planning for my return. She loved to prepare, to set the table, to organize her shop before it opened. I could easily remember her broad clomping walk as she went about these tasks, but when I pictured her face all I could see was Pear’s slow-blinking eyes.

Isaac, still squinting with sleep, helped me pick up dusty, cool handfuls from a kiddie pool filled with corn and barley grains. We lugged buckets back and laid a long line out along the fifteen-animal grain feeder. The sheep could hear what we were up to and baaed stridently—either because their udders were full, or because they were hungry. I kept waiting for Isaac to speak. We let fifteen sheep in through a small gate, and they thrust their heads through the feeder’s bars into the trough to tongue up the grain. Then we lowered a lever to lock the bars, holding the sheep in place, so we could milk them.

I went down the line, hand-milking the sheep into a stainless-steel bucket. I told Isaac that the needle of milk should hit his bucket with force, till the teat in his hand was like an empty glove.

Isaac said, “I don’t like getting all up in there.” I’d once felt that way. He didn’t like how the udder felt like human skin, oily and fragile. We went down the line in silence. The polydactyl cat followed us, waiting for a slosh of milk over the side of the bucket.

“Have you thought any more about coming home?” he said hopefully. I wanted to cry. In the hayloft, I’d had a vision of a happy shared future, but I knew how false it was.

“Remember when you told me I was stagnating?” I said.

He said, “I didn’t mean you should leave forever.” I didn’t like the way he smiled, as though he understood more than I did. “I asked you to marry me.”

I told myself it was time to be unkind to him. “We shouldn’t be together,” I said. “And I’ll prove it to you.” I reached for him. He thought I meant to hug him. He put his arms around me, arms so thin compared to Bay’s. But I was already feeling in his pocket. I found his camera, and I plunged it into my bucket of milk.

“Berie!” he said. The word rang against the milking parlor’s walls.