They were fine, I thought. I got back in the truck before my mother noticed that I’d kept the keys on me, and headed out.

FIFTEEN: SHANNON

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

I pulled into Bear’s just past sunset, the field out back black against a purple sky, a few lone, dark clouds drifting above the horizon. Bear turned on the recessed lights in the living room, dimmed them, opened a beer, and then started to work on a fire, a wadded bunch of newspaper going hot and fast underneath the logs.

“Where do you want to start today?” he asked, with his back to me. When he turned and looked me over, I thought I looked okay. I hadn’t been at work very long at all. When I’d gone home to get my mother, I’d thrown on one of Bear’s own shirts.

I stood stuck in the place between the kitchen and, as he called it, the great room. I was like a rabbit when you come upon it in the woods, when it stands real still like you can’t see it. Its eye big, its little heart racing.

He opened the fridge for another beer, handed it to me, a little close. His eyes scanned my chest. “Did you work today?” he asked.

“Not in this,” I laughed.

The room smelled like dry, seasoned wood and burning paper, like clean floor and oiled leather, the hint of hops from the beer. Nothing at all like my house. I hoped no one tried to open the fridge tonight.

Behind Bear were open frames on the counter, the kind a regular house would have filled with photos of babies and dogs, family outings, a wedding. There was a slim laptop, plugged in. Everything else was generic, staged in a way that left no trace of personality, just opulence and comfort. I started to feel like I was nowhere, the way it felt sometimes in the woods, in the car with Baby Jane, like the world outside there had disappeared and I was floating and nothing around me was real anymore.

I could feel Bear’s breath.

His eyes crinkled with amusement. He licked his lips and pulled the tie out of his hair, letting it uncoil to his shoulders. “Are you going to allow yourself a day off?” he asked.

“It’s not really a luxury I have,” I said.

“It is if you make it,” he said.

He fingered the edge of my sleeve, by my bicep, not enough to touch my actual arm but enough to send a charge through me. I jumped, and reached instinctively for my cigarettes.

“You want it back?” I said, half laughing.

“Not right now,” Bear answered.

I started toward the patio door.

“Here,” Bear said, and handed me a pack of American Spirits. “At least smoke better while you’re here.”

I took it, polite, and we stood on the covered patio watching the last of the light fall over the field, the swimming pool. There was a reason I liked my cheap reservation cigarettes. You had to pull like a bitch on an American Spirit to get a good drag.