Together, we carried the buckets of flowers to the worn wheelbarrow, all wood and rusted metal, and fit in as many as we could. I followed her around the tunnel and to the back of the house, until we reached a shed that housed a walk-in refrigerator. After setting the buckets on the shelves, we made another trip with the rest of the flowers, and then we were finished.

We closed up the shed and headed back toward the house. I took everything in as we walked together. The cold, wet air. Two ghost children on the green, pretending to have a picnic. The darkness and sky and the moon above the rocks.

“Coming back in?” Julia asked me at the side door.

I shook my head.

“Good night then, Mila,” she said.

“Good night.”

Summer was fading, the days still warm but the nights colder, and while the sky had been clear only a moment ago, a fog settled as I made my way to the other end of the field. I wished I had thought to take a lantern, but I made it to the barn door and let myself in. I felt across the inside wall for the switch and found it—but stopped before turning it on. What would the others think if they saw the schoolhouse suddenly bright? I wanted to be left alone there, without anyone checking on me. So I waited for my eyes to adjust before making my way to the closet, where beeswax taper candles rested in a basket, their holders in another. By the woodstove was a box of matches. I struck one and lit the candle, set it on the table.

I sat alone in the quiet.

“The common man pays for more than electricity and gas and water,” Blake told us one morning.

The summer was over but they hadn’t sent me back to school. Both of us—my mother and I—had to unlearn what we’d spent our lives learning. Blake would help us. He taught us the new lessons late at night, in the mornings when my mother returned from work with sore feet and tired eyes, around the fire and inside the frame of his skeleton house.

“The common man pays for the internet,” he went on. “He pays for cable, for Christ’s sake! Because he needs more and more and more! Like anyone could watch one hundred channels. What good is a life if you live it like that? Glued to a lightbox showing you pictures. Telling you when to laugh and what to fear. The common man lives this way because he has lost the intuition of our ancestors. All you need in order to live is this.” He took two fingers and pressed them to my mother’s wrist. Waited, waited, and then nodded.