“No.” I flip over the next card, a two of diamonds, which she takes with her five.

From the other room there’s the sound of something scratching, then the sudden notes of music. Fiona and I get up to see what it is, and we find Dad and her mom standing by the wall where the turntable’s plugged in. It spins the black disk around and around, letting out a squeal of horns.

“That’s jazz,” my father tells me, and I’m suddenly furious at him. There’s been no music in our house for years, just the sound of rain, the pellet stove burning, and occasional thunder. The only instrument we have is Mom’s old piano with its swelled dampers and stuck ivory keys, useless for anything but firewood and scrimshaw. It was like I’d forgotten there was such a thing as music, and now here it is, spilling into the living room as magical as if Dad had discovered sound itself, and I want to know why he’s giving this miracle away to a stranger instead of me.

But I don’t say any of that, I just stand there watching the machine spinning the record until the woman says the soup’s ready, to come and get it.

In her kitchen, she takes a bowl and ladles out soup for me. The bowl’s steaming hot against my hands, a stew with a fish head and big chunks of potato. I carry it to the wooden table in the living room, where the baseboard heaters let out a low rattle of warmth against my legs.

“Your dad says you’re good at math,” the woman tells me, which is news to me. I didn’t know he’d told anyone anything, though the last couple of months suddenly make a lot more sense: the sound of Dad’s truck starting up in the middle of the night, or him saying he was going to check the lobster traps and it’d be hours before he got back.

I shrug, though it’s true. I’ve read the textbooks I had from ninth grade over and over, trying to figure out what would’ve come after algebra. I write notes in the margins and fill up the dead hours that stretch through our house by drawing angles and figuring out equations. “I like architecture.”

“He told me.” The woman gets up and goes to the bookshelf, takes a fat book down, and hands it to me. “I thought maybe you’d like this.” Great Buildings of the World. The hardcover isn’t even waterlogged. I open the pages to a black-and-white photo of New York’s Flatiron alongside a long description and the original blueprints.

“Wow,” I say. There’s a building called Fallingwater, one called the Dancing House, another named the Bird’s Nest.

“Would you like it?”

I look at her. “Seriously? Yeah, thanks.”