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Women’s books,
Darius decided.
All of them books for unhappy women.

He told his parents he was staying with a friend and attending community college. They were disappointed by, but also somewhat accustomed to, this erratic approach to his education by now. His mother thought it was partially her fault. She’d had him held back from kindergarten for a year, thinking he was not emotionally ready for school, and feared that had set a pattern. He’d missed a semester in high school when he got sick with mono and pneumonia. He’d taken a gap year between high school and college that had turned into a year and a half of listlessness and hanging out at the country club, where he occasionally taught tennis. He’d always been older than his classmates. Never quite fit in.

In between his dirty jobs, Darius took out a few cash advances, as much as the ATM would allow at any one time. He told his parents, who were watching his accounts more closely than they used to, that the money was for tuition and books, but instead, he stockpiled into a new account in preparation for the inevitable moment when his parents cut him off again. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he felt sure something would turn up. As it always had before. Then, in the middle of August, he turned twenty-six and received a phone call from a lawyer who had the crackling voice and throat-clearing habit of an old man. This lawyer told him that he now had access to a trust his grandfather had set up for him. The existence of the trust was complete news to Darius. He wondered briefly if his father had known and never spoken of it to him on purpose, or if his grandfather had kept it a secret. The two men were polite to, yet suspicious of, each other and their opposing ideas about whether money was best used for security or show. The lawyer told him there would be an initial outlay of capital, $10,000, and then a regular stipend of $1,500 a month for five years. The lawyer said his grandfather’s hope had been that he would invest the money wisely and find himself with a great deal of financial security in his future. Darius rolled his eyes on the other end of the phone.

To Darius, this wasn’t much money. Typical of his frugal grandfather. Enough to assist, but not enough for financial independence. However, Darius was beginning to think his material needs were far fewer and less ambitious than he had once thought. In fact, he was beginning to think that the expensive materialism he had seen all around him growing up—$16 cocktails, $50,000 cars, $250 shoes—wasn’t for him at all. He liked his $3 premade submarine sandwiches and the coffee he could buy for pocket change.

In two months at the camp, he plowed through every paperback. Some he read twice. He began to seek out books at the little library in town. Then he drove to a bookstore in Plattsburgh. He read about Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism. He read apocalyptic, speculative, and science fiction titles. He read back-to-nature treatises. For the first time in his life, he considered the degradations of mankind and the abuse humans had heaped on the planet. As the summer slipped away and the days became crisp, when the day approached that he was supposed to be sitting in a college seminar, he cut up the credit cards his parents had supplied him with as a buffer against the bruising uncertainties of the world and mailed them the pieces in an envelope with no return address.

The weathered
F
OR
S
ALE
sign was tipped over, sticking from the ground as if it had been struck by a plow the winter before. Or maybe several winters before. A vine had wrapped itself around the post, and a tendril hanging over the board waved at him in a vaguely lascivious way, like a woman at a window. He turned off the dirt road he’d been following onto a pocked and pitted drive. Muddy water splashed out from under his car tires as he rocked and pitched his way down the well-worn, weed-infested gravel. After about one-quarter of a twisting mile, the drive ended abruptly in front of a farmhouse. A dark, dejected, and morose thing sitting slump-shouldered in the midst of overgrown scrub. The porch drooped off to one side, the screen door was canted halfway open, and a couple of once bright-white planters that were now gray with mold hung from the crosspieces. Tattered lace curtains hung in the spider-webbed windows. There was a barn set back from the house. It was more erect—more resilient, apparently, to the abuses of weather and neglect.

Darius got out of the car. When he slammed the door, something skittered under the house. He heard it hiss but saw only two eyes, dark and reflective, before they turned and disappeared. He took a few steps forward and stood in the yard of knee-high grass. He watched another creature covered in fur and stealth slide through a crack in the barn door. A bird called, distant and plaintive. Then silence settled into the overcast air.

Darius made mental notes. The turnoff to the house had to be almost five miles down a poorly maintained and lightly traveled dirt road. The trees, scrub, and twisted driveway made the farmhouse and barn impossible to see from the road. The land around the buildings sloped upward, leaving them in a kind of bowl that kept the site extremely secluded. Darius did not realize this meant that the cold of the coming season would collect here and stay far into the following spring. Those sorts of concerns were beyond his experience. He went to the barn and pushed the door against its rusted rollers, shoving it aside just enough to peer in. Dim light from a few broken windows worked its way past dust motes. He made out a couple of stalls and a separate area with a workbench and wall hooks. He’d never had so much as a pet turtle growing up, but he quickly filled the barn with an imaginary cow, a goat, and a few chickens. He stepped back into the yard and sneezed. He saw, off to the side of the barn, the decayed rib cage of a structure, with tattered strips of weather-beaten plastic flapping in the breeze. It took him several minutes of staring and the sudden memory of a drawing in one of his back-to-subsistence-farming books to realize this had once been a hoop house. Then he quickly imagined the metal structure straightened, re-covered with fresh plastic, and filled with tidy flats of vegetables getting a head start on spring, safe from cold blasts of air, reaching their green fronds toward the wan winter sun.

He walked over to the farmhouse. The steps to the front porch were tilted and springy with rot, but they held as he climbed them. The door was locked, so he stepped back into the yard and looked upward. Two rooflines moved away from each other at hard right angles. He’d never been in an old farmhouse, but he filled in what he could not see with mental pictures of a compact kitchen with a tin-top table; a lumpy, overstuffed chair in a parlor; a few bedrooms at the top of a short, steep staircase. He wasn’t sure where these images came from, but there they were, quaint and romantic.

Yes,
he thought.
Yes, this will do. This will more than do.

When he left, he had to get out of his car and step over to the
F
OR
S
ALE
sign, then rub away some moss and mold to make out the phone number. When he called, the agent asked him to describe the house and where it was. Darius tried, but he didn’t know what landmarks to conjure; some of the roads near there did not have street signs. He’d only found it because he’d been intentionally turning down smaller and smaller roads and had gotten lost on his way back, finding himself finally spit out onto the main two-lane road three towns above the one where he was living. The agent said he’d have to get back to him. When he called Darius a few days later, he told him the listing had actually expired a couple of years back.

“Do you have any more information?” Darius asked. “Is the house still for sale? Is there someone else I could call?”

The agent said he was new in the office and had no idea who had originally listed it. He suggested Darius look up the deed at City Hall. Darius found three listings with the same last name as the property owner’s. He called one number, which rang endlessly. The other was picked up by a person who thought Darius was a salesman of some sort and hung up on him. When he dialed the third, a woman answered. He thought he heard her drag on a cigarette as he told his story of discovering an abandoned farmhouse that he hoped to buy. Darius found it strange to say so many words. He had not had much conversation with anyone for months. Once he started talking, it seemed hard to stop.

“How the hell did you find the place?” the woman on the other end of the phone finally interjected into his steady flow of words.

Darius sputtered to a stop and laughed, relieved to be interrupted.

“There was a sign,” he said.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I haven’t been out there in ages.”

“Your house?” he asked.

“No, my grandmother’s. She died, oh, five, six years ago. We put it on the market, but no one was interested. Figured the place would just rot back into the ground.”

“Well, I’m interested,” Darius said firmly.

“Seriously?” Her voice was full of amusement and incredulity. “I mean, why?”

“I’m looking for something I can work on. Get my hands dirty. Make it my own,” Darius said with a newfound and totally manufactured confidence.

The voice on the other end of the phone guffawed. “Well, you’ll get all that and more with that place,” she said.

They made plans to meet out there in a few days. She said her name was Sally. Darius went to the library and checked out some how-to books on carpentry, gardening, and homesteading. He went to the hardware store and stood in the tool aisles, staring at the implements there, daydreaming about their uses, imagining how they might feel in his hands. He was not ready for tools, he knew this, but he bought an ax and a hammer—heavy, useful things that he’d never owned before. He set them by the door in the cabin and picked them up from time to time, ran his hands up and down their shafts, picturing the potential for useful work each tool seemed to hold in quiet abeyance. He went back to the store and bought a tool belt. He put it on in the bathroom of the cabin and looked at himself in the mirror, turning this way and that as if he were a high school girl trying on a prom dress. He admired the way the leather strap sat on his narrow hips.

On the day he was to meet Sally, Darius gave himself extra time to get to the farmhouse, remembering how lost he’d become when he’d left it and trying to retrace his steps home. He had no trouble this time and got there fifteen minutes early. There was already another vehicle there. A truck. Small, dark green, with rust eating away at several places on the panels. Darius was suddenly, sharply, jealous. He wanted a beat-up truck instead of his low-slung Saab. A woman was there, too, standing in the front doorway. A compact, sturdy presence, her hands stuffed into the back pockets of her jeans, work boots laced up on the outside of her pants, her hair tossed into a tumult around her face by the gusty winds of an increasingly brisk September. She raked her hair out of her eyes with her fingertips and stuffed it through the opening at the back of a ball cap. She didn’t smile as he got out of the car and moved toward her. He was surprised to find that he couldn’t read her expression. Her lips parted in a way that could as easily be mocking as welcoming. Her teeth were a little crooked and overlapping. He wondered why she’d not had braces. It never dawned on him that dental work, for some people, was a luxury rather than a necessity. She was not conventionally pretty, but there was a rough-hewn handsomeness to her face. She stuck out her hand and gave his a couple of firm pumps.

A handshake like a man’s,
he thought. She appeared to him not unlike the farmhouse itself—good bones, but a fixer-upper.

Sally showed him in and they wandered the half-dozen dusty rooms. Even Darius could see that the house had little to recommend it. There was chipped linoleum where he’d thought he’d find scuffed wood floors, and garish wallpaper where he’d pictured wainscoting with layers upon layers of paint. There was no fireplace, just black spots where sparks had jumped from a long-gone woodstove onto the matted orange carpet. It smelled like cat pee and an old campfire.

Still, he liked it. He’d been alone too much recently. He was ready to like anything.

“What do you do?” he asked Sally as they stood in the dank living room, swiveling their heads around in the thick air of the long-closed-off space.

“Do?” she said. “Do about what?”

“You know, for work.” He was irritated by what he felt was her unnecessary stonewalling of his obvious query.

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes. No one Darius knew smoked cigarettes. Certainly not indoors. Sally shook one out of the pack and lighted it before answering him.

“I’m a social worker,” she said.

Darius wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “What sort of social worker?” he asked, trying to cover his ignorance.

“I work for the state,” Sally said. “I work with kids. Foster kids. JDs. Fucked-up kids and their fucked-up families.”

Darius wondered what a “JD” was but didn’t ask. He was a bit startled by her use of profanity. He didn’t know any women who swore so freely.