She couldn’t sleep. Too many Chinese uppers. So she poured herself her fourth glass of red wine, leaned back on the couch, and wondered at what point drinking late at night became drinking in the morning. If she went to bed, she’d just lie there obsessing anyway. She’d been fired. Terminated. Axed. Canned. Told to take a long walk off a short pier.

It was for the best, she decided. Getting the pink slip. Getting shown the door. This whole thing. She had money saved up. And it wasn’t like she had to pay rent. Now she was free to write what she wanted. She was free of carpet off-gassing and fluorescent lights and people who rode the elevator one floor instead of taking the stairs. She was free of the lobby receptionists who always pretended to never remember who she was. She was free of Ian.

There were too many bouquets in the living room. What had she been thinking? It smelled like the bathroom of a fancy restaurant in there—all orchidy and oppressively sweet.

She got up and sniffed around the room until she found the most egregious offenders. Easter lilies. She’d always thought that lilies kind of stank. Who wanted a flower you could smell from upstairs? The Romans believed that lilies were created when Juno was nursing Hercules, and milk fell from the sky. Old breast milk. That’s what lilies were.

Susan grabbed the lilies out of the earthenware vase she’d put them in and, holding them at arm’s length, headed for the back door. It was still raining. It was going to rain for the rest of her life. She could hear it out there, falling in torrents off the overflowing gutters of her mother’s crumbling Victorian house. Susan put on her rubber boots and the Mexican poncho Bliss kept on a hook by the back door, flipped on the back porch light, and headed out into the backyard with the bouquet.

The compost pile was in the back corner of the yard. Her mother had not upgraded to the big black plastic-lidded barrels that everyone else in Portland seemed to have. People in Portland were increasingly obsessed with composting. Even fast-food joints did it, at least the locally owned ones. You went to bus your tray and it took ten minutes to figure out which of the five categories your trash fit into. But Bliss was old school. She still had the giant wood-and-chicken-wire corral that Susan’s father had built before he’d started dying. You had to pull bricks off the tarp that covered it, stuff in what you wanted to compost, and then stir the compost with a rusty pitchfork that would send most people running for a tetanus shot.