I walked over to the municipal golf course and sat by the pond to eat my sandwich. The corner bites were very good.

My room was empty when I got back. The stench of the summer’s cigarettes sat on the walls. There wasn’t much comfort in the blankness of the skylight that day. I felt like being nice and having people like me.

I plugged a dime into the phone in the hall and called Jean, my brother’s wife. She said don’t be silly, of course I could come out for the weekend. She was making jam.

I took a bath and washed my hair, put on clean clothes. Sat under the skylight to dry, waited for my brother to stop by for me on his way home from work.

He howled, “Sally!” up the stairs; he’d never climb them all with his bad knee. And he was probably afraid of what he’d find at the top. I thundered down fast. He stood on the porch with a steel helmet tipped back on his head. A red mark from the sweat band had formed on his freckled forehead. I could smell his sweat. He wore scarred, steel-tipped boots. There was a red triangle at his throat, where his open collar let in the heat of his welding.

“This dump is just kindling. Can’t you get a room lower down? You’d be cooked up there if it ever caught fire.”

There were boards and pipes and tools in the back of the pickup. Sitting high in the cab, I looked down on the cars streaking past. Spike was thinking of buying land in Canada. His oldest boy would be eligible for the draft soon.

“Remember how Ma jerked us onto the farm when she thought I’d get drafted during the Korean War?”

“There were other ways to get out of it. I think Sam claimed he was psycho or wore pink underpants to the physical or something.”

“He’s still planning to move out into the woods. He worries me.”

“I haven’t seen them in a while.”

“Jean goes over pretty often. She’s trying to get his wife to bring their laundry over to our place. See, the thing that bothers me is it’s not impossible to live like Aram wants to. My friend Little George has a place in the woods and grows his own food and just goes out logging a couple of months a year for the cash he needs. But I don’t know if Aram can do that. He’s a city boy. Seems to think if he can read a book about something and talk about it, it’s as good as done. I don’t see why he wants to be a trapper, anyway. He wasn’t raised to it, and it’s a hard life.”