“Honey, you’re going to notice it more and more. Don’t stand for it. Do what you can to reeducate people. Step directly in front of them and force them to hold your gaze, if you must.”

Rita ended the tour of work by showing Ammalie a little golf cart that could be driven down the dirt pathways from cabin to cabin with the clean bedding and supplies. She told Ammalie to start the day by cleaning the cabin called North Star. Then she was gone, a whirlwind calmed, and Ammalie stood there, touching her head, taking in the cluster of cabins and blue-sky day.

She drove the golf cart down the dirt path that wound itself through the property, learning the gist of the cart and the property. She felt oddly gleeful. She was a grown woman and still somehow delighted by the thrill of a small motorized vehicle. And also because the cabins had wonderful names, which she listed over and over in her head.

Moonsquin

While-Away

Evensong

Epiphany

She singsonged their names; they all sounded like not only good places to be but also good internal places too, as if each one offered advice on how to spend the day.

—

Her head hurt but her body enjoyed actual physical labor—not planks, not lunges, not walking, but necessary and useful labor. Scrubbing and vacuuming and changing sheets. Maybe that’s why she had liked carrying plates and trays—she liked moving with purpose. All of it left her panting and occasionally grunting, but she felt strong, felt her arm muscles working as they had when she’d been waitressing. She felt the strength in her core when she lifted and flipped the clean white sheets over the bed.

For the first time since she’d been on the road, she played music on her phone while she worked. She’d been living in such silence, she realized—but that’s because she had wanted to hear a car pulling up, her ears always attuned to danger. Now she put on her favorites, old folk songs and new folk songs. Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt and Townes Van Zandt and Eva Cassidy and Nanci Griffith.

Her sister had been the one to help her fall in love with music, plinking the piano and teaching her Carpenters tunes. Sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong…

She wondered how Apricot was doing, felt the pang of the rift between them—the endless dealings with the mess their mother had left. There hadn’t even been any money—so it wasn’t that—it was instead just the separation of tasks, the “Did you call the bank and ask if she had a safe-deposit box?” and “Who canceled her Netflix subscription?” and “Did you take the millionth load of junk to Goodwill?”

It had taken more than a year and there was so much stuff—stuff was such a burden!—and nothing good resulted except that Vincent had witnessed it and heeded the inherent lesson, which was, as he put it, “to get one’s shit in order,” and he had done just that. He put all their accounts on a spreadsheet, set up life insurance policies, discussed and wrote down their burial-spot wishes (a green burial if possible, and if not, cremated, ashes scattered illegally along the river, their favorite place to walk), wrote a will. They’d sat down together to discuss everything. Then they’d cleaned out the garage, pared down the detritus of life, and organized cabinets and drawers. It had been calm and comforting to do, actually. It took months, but it was a good set of months, and they’d frequently had sex afterward and a nice glass of wine—something about the mutual work increased the mutual attraction. Come to think of it, their Death Prep months had probably been the best months of their entire marriage.

So, in a way, her fight with Apricot had helped her marriage—had created a period of peace and ease. And, of course, all that work had helped her enormously upon his death.

Apricot was not Apricot’s real name. Her real name had been Heidi—Ammalie and Heidi, from old Dutch relatives—but Heidi had gone to the trouble of changing her name in her twenties, which was when she wanted to make it big as an actress and figured she needed a memorable name. The acting thing had lasted about two years, with a local theater community performance or two, and then Apricot had become a real estate agent. But the most interesting thing about her life was her obsession with garage sales and amassing all sorts of high-quality random items. Such as, when she heard that Ammalie was going to go on a road trip of sorts—Ammalie had kept the details vague, just saying she needed some space to grieve and pay tribute to some of her memories with Vincent—she sent her some of the items Ammalie was using now. The travel pillow that collapsed into nearly nothing, the efficient camp stove, the tiny kit of high-quality silverware and cutting board and kitchen items that tetrussed amazingly well into the smallest possible space.

She loved her sister, she did, and she worried about her health. It’s just that their infrequent phone conversations had lapsed into vague topics that would be the same things you’d discuss with a stranger, all of which rendered a real relationship nearly impossible. It was after one such call that Ammalie had looked around her kitchen and thought, This is my boring chitchat life, and her eyes had fallen on a box of keys, particularly one with some red nail polish, mostly worn away by time, that being the key to the Colorado cabin. That was one of the several small moments that had hatched this big idea, so she supposed she had her sister to thank for that too.

—

The beauty of this job was that she had task after task to do, and there was none of the decision-making of having a completely open day. Rita came in to briefly inspect her work—not that she didn’t trust Ammalie, she said, but just that she wanted to discuss standards. She approved the sheet-tuck and the toilet and the tub and the windows and pointed out that it was easy to forget cleaning inside the microwave. Her final piece of advice was to always check one last time under the bed, because if there’s one thing that creeped people out, it was finding some item, not their own, underneath where they’d been sleeping.

Since there was only one cabin that needed cleaning until later in the day, Rita asked Ammalie to rake the walkways and stack up twigs and fallen branches for a future bonfire. “If you need any extra work gloves, there’s a big lost-and-found box under one of the bunk beds in your room,” she said.

Ammalie felt her heart lurch upward. She was so tired of wearing the same few outfits—cars were small, after all, and so she’d limited herself to two pairs of pants and four shirts, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d come to hate the sight of them for no other reason than that they were the same. Repetitiveness was depressing. Green sweatshirt, gray flannel shirt, maroon T-shirt, thermal turtleneck, red jacket.

As she’d hoped, the box held all sorts of treasures, some ugly and some rather cute, especially a purple-blue athletic jacket, which she pulled on. She started a load of her own laundry—everything was grimy now—and then took the time to write Powell a card, one that would arrive on Vincent’s birthday, she hoped. She didn’t explain the trip or her current life, but rather just wrote a small list of favorite memories that she had of Powell and Vincent. She could have gone on and on, but she was limited by space, and besides, it would accomplish what she wanted, which was to let Powell know she was thinking of him. Then she wrote Mari and Apricot each a postcard, telling them a few of the things she most appreciated about them.

Finally, she took a quick break and checked her scalp. Her head certainly ached and had a long lumpy raised area, but the pain was bearable, and there was no more blood and no pus or signs of infection. She dabbed on fresh antibiotic ointment and gauze and pulled her tight-fitting cap over it all. Bodies and hearts were strangely fragile, and yet also strangely capable of repair.

—

As Ammalie filled the bird feeders that evening, Lulu ran out in a puffy pink jacket and hat. With sidewalk chalk in hand, she followed Ammalie around, making quick chalk drawings on the small bits of sidewalk or flagstone as they went. Together they watched the birds, particularly an acorn woodpecker, but the most amusing thing about Lulu was simply the speed at which she talked, darting around like a bird herself.

“Do you have any sisters or brothers?”

“One sister. I was just thinking about her, actually.”

“Where does she live?”

“New York.”

“What does she do?”

“She sells houses.”

Lulu sucked in her cheeks and gazed directly at Ammalie’s face. The honesty of the gaze made Ammalie want to ask about Lulu’s family, but not if it caused pain. She kept the question vague. “Tell me about your life.”

“I have a mom and dad and Grandpa Dan.” Then, “I miss my mom and dad. Sometimes at night I get super homesick, but they call at eight p.m., and I might go home for Thanksgiving.”

There was more to the story, obviously—she could hear it in the little pauses in Lulu’s tumble of words—but she didn’t press. “I’m sure they miss you too.”

Lulu singsonged on. “I’m going to be a nurse and save people. And if I like it, then I’ll go back to school and be a doctor. But also be a birder. You hear that sound? That’s a white-breasted nuthatch, I think. I call them the nasal-nose bird.”

Ammalie closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun, feeling the simple delight of the joy of this kid. “I love that. I can think of no other profession that is so immediately helpful. My mother was a nurse. It’s a great gift, to be a good nurse or doctor.”

“My mom’s cancer is not a horrible kind. So don’t worry. But the nurses help her the most.”

Ah. Ammalie had often wondered if people went into professions strongly influenced by their parents—either what their parents had done, or the opposite of what their parents had done, or what would piss their parents off the most, or, as in this case, the profession that would most help their parents. Mari, for example, had become a physical therapist because her mother had been in great neck pain all her life, and so Mari had grown up knowing about C2 and C3 and stretches and exercises. And Vincent had become an accountant because his father’s business had gone under, and he’d always said that if only his father had given him control earlier, it could have been saved—which is why, she considered now, he’d ended up believing that bad things happened when you lost control.

Yes, it was true that Careers Were Greatly Influenced by Parents, and she decided to add that to her list of Basic Truths About Human Nature. Meanwhile, she asked Lulu if she could borrow some chalk, and knelt down on the bit of sidewalk pathway, and together they drew swirls of color.

CHAPTER 13

“Storm moving in, they say!” Rita said one day, after a series of lovely days in which Ammalie settled into the routine of this new life. “Weather is what keeps us in our place!”

Rita had just swung herself through the door with a gust of very cold air, and Ammalie rushed forward to help with the armful of firewood stacked so high that it rendered Rita’s face invisible.

“We are not the most powerful force on earth,” Rita huffed. “Not that you can trust a meteorologist! But they try. We humans just try. We need to be gentle with one another. Assume good intentions. I say just let the one cabin go today; instead, won’t you help me find all the snow shovels and bring in more firewood? Lady Shackleton is fine, by the way.”

Ammalie stacked some of the firewood and then glanced outside at the hard bits of gray snow falling, and it reminded her of the snow at Kenosha Pass, which seemed a lifetime ago. But it also made her think of Kit—please, god, may he not be out in the desert. She had planned to go back to Dart soon, with extra supplies just in case he was around, and either way, to leave them in the trailer for any future person in need.

In the meantime, she helped Rita, working as quickly as possible. They built a fire in the lounge’s small fireplace and lugged in more wood and stacked it alongside a wall. She found three snow shovels and dropped one off at each of the three closest cabins, during which time Rita shoveled the bit of snow that had already accumulated. During her lunch break, Ammalie fixed a quick grilled cheese with pesto, and as an afterthought, filled her coffeepot and water bottles and extra cooking pans with water, just in case. She was about to go fill the bird feeders when the lights blinked.

Flickered on. Flickered off. Went out.

It was so anticlimactic. No big storm, no big wind. Just no power.

Rita knocked on her door and poked her head into the dorm room. “Something must have happened up the road. I’m heading out. Rex says he’s not feeling well and I need to check on him. Before I go, I’ll knock on people’s doors and tell them what they already know, which is, the electricity is out. What they might not know is that we’re on a well. And that means there’s no water, either. So they’re going to have to save any water for drinking, and they’re going to have to flush toilets the old-fashioned way, by dumping ditch water in the bowl and relying on gravity. Snow, ditch water, whatever. I’ll need you to hold down the fort, won’t you? If the electricity comes back on, please fill every container you can. I wish I had some iodine tablets, for snowmelt. Drinking water will be the real emergency here. That, and the cold. Please calm everyone; no need for too much panic. People will rise to the occasion, eh? Because they have no choice. Humans are funny that way. And this will pass soon enough. Just a wee storm.”

Ammalie waved goodbye and glanced at the sky—thick gray, with a dark, billowing cloud bank taking over. But she was smiling. After all, she’d rehearsed the survival sequence of events a million times in her mind to put herself to sleep. Yes, water. When it wasn’t available, you had to know how to move fast, fast, fast to procure and store one of life’s most necessary elements. She remembered reading a story about 9/11, about a woman near Ground Zero who had had the foresight to fill her bathtub with water as soon as she heard the first news report, and when the water was cut off soon after, she was able to fill her neighbors’ water bottles. One small act had helped so many. And iodine tablets? She had plenty of those.

Ammalie supposed many books got read that day, by windows, and with the muted light of a sun thrumming through the clouds. Or perhaps the guests did puzzles. Or played games of Scrabble—there was a faded maroon box containing the familiar tiles on a shelf in her room, and once again, she felt a pang of not having a partner.