For a long time all I heard was the hiss of milk into her bucket. “I’m more free than I was before,” she said, “but wherever I go, I find myself.” Unlike Dice, unlike Sara, Queen seemed to be still working things out. She smiled again. “Even though Dice says there’s no such thing as the definite self, did he tell you that?”

I nodded.

“You remind me of a girl I used to know,” Queen said. “Cassie. She was a watcher too.”

I moved my stool closer. She began talking to me about actions that create authenticity. For example, she said, once you get a tattoo, you’re the kind of person who would have a tattoo. For example, she’d never been sexy, never felt sexy, and then she had sex for the first time and though she felt just the same, she knew she was now sexy. The action made her so, incontrovertibly. I nodded along, though I didn’t completely understand.

“It’s just like the Ash Family,” Queen said, and she was smiling again, at something that seemed in the past or future: “If you try to be a part of it, you are,” she said. “You have to be open.”

“Dice said I am open,” I said.

“Start by telling me about how your mother let you down.”

“What do you mean?” I said, so quickly I didn’t have time to consider it.

Queen tilted her head. “Yesterday, at breakfast, Dice said it.” Queen’s tone was determined. “She left you alone, right? She abandoned you?”

I remembered my mother’s reflection in the linoleum at the airport, such a big solid woman made small and uncertain by a trick of the light. It felt like someone was pressing two fingers into the base of my throat. “Yes,” I said. “She was horrible.” Maybe, in a certain light.

Queen patted my shoulder the way she’d patted the cow.

I said, “Why didn’t you want to go on the action?”

She smiled. “I didn’t want to fast,” she said. “I’m afraid of going hungry, so Dice didn’t make me.” She squeezed my arm. Like Dice’s, her grip was so strong it felt mechanical. “I know it’s a lot to take in at first,” she said, “but no one here will ever make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

I looked at the ground and nodded.

“Believe me,” she said. Her eyes were pink.

She let go of me. A cow bellowed, its voice breaking. Queen wiped at her face. I wondered how she got that name but I was afraid to ask. “Do you think they’ll manage to stop the mountaintop removal?”