She’s in my rocking chair, feet curled under her, hands pulled into her sweatshirt sleeves so only her fingertips show, wrapped around her goblet. I can feel her chewing on how to say what she’s thinking. “I’m sorry if I’m…standoffish.”

“Nah.” I sigh, with a little huffed chuckle lost in it somewhere. “I’ve been standoffish and prickly for years. I mean, I’ve never been a super sociable Chatty Cathy typa guy. Dad didn’t talk much, so I never got the habit. But then after Lisa died, I’d go days, weeks without saying much of anything but monosyllabic answers to direct questions, and sometimes not even that.”

“If you grew up in the wilderness, how’d you go to school?”

I snort. “Good question. Answer is, I didn’t. Dad was older, see. Right on the edge of draft age eligibility. He’d been an adjunct professor before he got drafted. So, he homeschooled me, but that’s a generous term for it. Taught me to read, write, do math. Enough that I wouldn’t come across as this illiterate, uneducated bumpkin, which I was. He had old copies of things like Herodotus and the Illiad and Mark Twain, and he’d carry them with him on our treks, and I learned to read on those. For those stretches of months we spent at home, he’d check out books from the library, books on science and history and biographies and stuff like that, and that’d be my education in that subject. Most of what he taught me was woodworking and woodcraft, and survivalism. Book learning was basically just to keep me from being a complete outcast when I left home. I was anyway. I left home at seventeen, apprenticed myself to a carpenter, and he set me on track into trade school, and I only got halfway through before a friend’s dad noticed the quality of my work and hired me on at his construction company, and things went from there.”

“You had a really unusual upbringing.”

“Yeah. I guess I did.”

“Where’s your dad now? Passed on?”

I shrug. “I dunno. After I left home, he vanished. Went off into the woods somewhere and never came back.”

Silence.

“I’ve talked and thought more about my childhood these last few weeks than I have in years,” she says.

“Same.”

“Why, do you think that is?”

“Easier than the hard stuff?”

“That’s what I was thinking, too.” She pauses with her goblet partway to her mouth, making her words echo. “The hard stuff is just so fucking…hard.”

“Maybe the past is another way for us to keep trying to avoid the hard stuff, though.”

“Yeah, I’m worried you’re right there, too.” She finishes her wine, stands up. “I’m going to go. I did really enjoy today, so thank you.”

“See you ’round.”