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“Sounds like hard work,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

“Sometimes. At least the job is secure. Never a shortage of delinquents around here.”

Ah,
he thought.
Delinquents. Juvenile Delinquents. JDs.

He wasn’t sure what to do next. Sally stared at him and took a long drag on her cigarette. The directness of her gaze made him uncomfortable in a way he’d never been before. He was used to people coming at each other in a certain way. There was a standard set of questions one normally asked, about fathers’ last names, firms worked for, schools attended. These queries were always pitched in a tone designed to sound casual and friendly, but the answers were used to place people in a pecking order, to help decide if you were someone to compete with, dismiss, or try to cozy up to. This Sally person was doing none of these things. Darius wondered how old she was. She looked like she’d lived a lot more than he had. That didn’t necessarily mean she was much older. He wanted to ask her age, but that was a question he knew was considered impolite. At least among the people he was used to. Maybe it didn’t matter to someone like her.

“How old are you?” he asked quickly, before his courage gave out.

She gave him an annoyed look. He didn’t care. He wanted to know.

“That’s a rude fucking question,” Sally said. “Not that I care. But still. Twenty-nine.”

He nodded instead of apologizing. Looked around the room to avoid looking at her.

“Not from around here, are you?” she asked, squinting against an exhalation of smoke.

He shook his head.

“What do you think of the place?” she asked, then sucked on her cigarette again.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“Yup,” she said, crushing the cigarette under her boot and into the orange carpet. “Definitely not from around here.”

Darius tried and failed to get bank financing. His small trust fund and lack of a job or credit history did not impress the bank officers. He came to Sally with the news, expecting that would be the end of things, but Sally said she’d take his $10,000 down payment and hold the mortgage herself.

“What do I have to lose?” she said with a shrug. “Even if you bail on me, I’m still ahead ten thousand bucks.”

They met a few weeks later and signed a simple purchase-and-sale agreement she’d downloaded from the Internet.

“David?” she asked as she looked things over. “Thought you said your name was Darius?”

“My legal name is David. But I’ve been called Darius for most of my life.”

“Two kings,” Sally said.

Darius looked at her quizzically.

“A Jewish king and a Persian king?”

Darius was silent.

“Never mind,” she said as she handed him a set of keys.

She had brought a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to celebrate the deal. They emptied the cans down their throats while wandering the rooms, then crushed and left them on the floor. As they went, Darius made mental notes about the projects he would take on to fix the place up, an endeavor he unrealistically and optimistically imagined would take only until spring. He listened with half his attention as Sally reminisced about her grandmother.

“She lived here alone for as long as I can remember,” Sally said. “Mowed her own yard. Well, more like bushwhacked it, I guess, as there was never anything you’d call a lawn.”

The day was damp and the rooms were chilled. The trees were shedding their leaves, and bits of snow spit and swirled in the air.

“She even shoveled snow,” Sally said, popping the tab on another beer. “Just enough to get to the barn. Mostly stayed holed up here when the snow got too deep. Ate stuff she’d canned. A deer she killed. Pig she’d raised. Chickens too old to lay eggs. Died in her eighties with an ax in her hand, just about to split a log. Still ran a fucking chainsaw. Don’t make them like that old broad anymore.”

Darius smiled and nodded as Sally talked. He took no interest in what she said and was unaware that these kinds of stories, told to another sort of person, might make them feel a deeper connection to the house and land. He simply wanted to get started. On something. Get himself set up and ready. For what, he wasn’t exactly sure, but having a place of his own seemed a vital first step. He reflexively drank the beers she handed to him, thinking that after the cans were emptied she’d leave and he could walk the rooms that now belonged to him alone, thinking, planning. Instead, when the last can was tossed aside, she folded her legs beneath her, sank to the living room floor, and fingered a joint out of the corner of her cigarette pack.

“Mind?” she asked.

Darius shook his head. Sally inhaled and then pointed the joint toward him. He shrugged, sat next to her on the floor, and took a toke or two. He was not much of a fan of weed but figured helping her finish the joint, as he had the beers, would send her on her way sooner. This, too, did not work out as he planned. Instead, after the slender joint was finished, she gave him another one of her disconcertingly direct looks, then shocked him by shouldering out of her jacket, pulling her shirt over her head, and pushing him backward onto the carpet. Her mouth hit his, her tongue searched for his, and he was stunned into submission. She ground her jeaned hips into his groin, and he was taken aback by how quickly and completely he swelled. He let himself return her rough kiss. Her mouth tasted smoky and sweet, like burned marshmallows. She pushed her pants and underwear down, freed one leg, pulled him from his pants, rode him until she came, then kept going until the moment just before he came, when she expertly pulled back, leaving him with a quickly cooling puddle of semen on his stomach.

It took Darius a moment to bring her face back into focus. She already had her pants pulled back up, her shirt on, and was lighting another cigarette by the time he came out of his orgasmic haze.

“A celebratory fuck,” she said. “To seal the deal.”

He stared at her.

“Can’t say as I’ve ever been with a rich, preppy boy like you,” she said.

“I’m not rich,” Darius said.

Sally rolled her eyes. “Right. You bought this place with money you saved in a jelly jar by mowing lawns all through high school.”

Darius sort of despised her in that moment. He had thought so little of her, with her coarse manners and cheap beer. When she said that, it occurred to him it was possible she thought even less of him than he did of her. When she left that day, he was glad to see her go. He thought it was all over now. The place was his. She’d leave him alone as long as he sent the mortgage payment in on time.

Yet, the next weekend, her beater truck came up the driveway again. She walked onto the porch with a toolbox.

“Figured you might need some of this stuff,” she said. “You’re welcome to borrow it. Don’t care if you break anything, as it all belonged to my ex, anyway.”

She didn’t stay this time, just dropped her burdens inside the front door, turned, waved over her shoulder, and left. Darius picked through the items in the toolbox. He was unsure how many of them might be used, what they would be called upon to do, as if they were relics from another culture. Silence descended over the empty farmhouse. In Sally’s absence, what had been solitude quickly turned into loneliness.

A couple of weeks later, she stopped by again. This time with another twelve-pack. “Wanted to see how you were making out,” she said by way of welcome and explanation.

This time she stayed. Not for long. Just long enough to see that he’d yet to move in. He was still at the cabin, coming out to the farmhouse now and then. He’d done little in the way of improvements. Threw some of the decaying furniture into a pile behind the barn. Ripped the peeling wallpaper back in a few places. Pulled up the carpet in spots. He wasn’t sure where to begin or what to finish. Sally clicked her tongue as she assessed his efforts, without making any comments. Darius wondered if she had nostalgia for the house, for some set of childhood memories made there, and if that was why she kept reappearing. As if in answer to his unspoken question, she said how much she had hated the place, how much she had disliked having to spend weekends there when she was a kid, away from her drinking, fighting parents, but alone with her taciturn grandmother, with no television and a plate of boiled dinner.

“What’s boiled dinner?” Darius asked.

“Bunch of tasteless meat and vegetables boiled together. Then you chop it up and serve it again in the morning as shit on a shingle.”

He grinned at her. He was starting to get her sense of humor.

“I’ll make it for you sometime,” she said, grinning back.

She wandered the rooms with him again, pointing at things and offering advice on how to remove wallpaper, prep pipes so they didn’t freeze, whom to call to get the utilities turned back on, the steps required to refinish the floors. She told him real snow would be there soon enough and gave him the name of someone to plow the driveway, showed him how to secure his garbage so the raccoons and bears wouldn’t get in it, and cautioned him about the dangerous listing of the porch stairs.

“My ex was a contractor. Handyman,” she said by way of explanation. “’Course, just about anyone who can swing a hammer around here is.”

By the time Sally stopped by again, a couple of weeks later, Darius had gotten all the wallpaper off the walls of the dining room and the matted gold-tone carpet out of one of the bedrooms. He’d picked up a few mismatched chairs, a wobbly table, and a random collection of plates, cutlery, and cooking utensils.

“Where’d you get this shit?” Sally asked.

“Mostly junk shops,” he answered. “Plenty of those around.”

“Guess you’re not as much of a rich boy as I thought,” she said, setting down the pizza she’d brought in with her.

And you’re not as much of a white-trash bitch as I thought,
Darius almost said but kept to himself instead.

Darius had also acquired a mattress. This was the only thing he’d purchased new. On sale. No box spring, just a stark white rectangle thrown down on the floor of an empty upstairs bedroom with a twisted sleeping bag curled up on it like something already asleep. After they finished the pizza and the beer—in bottles, this time—Sally spent the night. Their sex, in spite of the mattress, was no more leisurely than before.

Sally started showing up regularly most weekends. And instead of just pointing and giving advice, she would strap on a tool belt and help out. Darius never asked why she’d come over or if she’d come again, and Sally never offered an explanation. Darius would hear the rattle of an old truck and look out the window from whatever task he was at, wondering if it was Sally instead of the toothless manure-smelling guy who plowed his driveway for him. Darius was always vaguely irritated by, but also reluctantly glad for, her company. He loved his solitude, but the weeks were long and unrelieved, the snows were starting in earnest, and there was little to do but work and read. He’d moved on from self-help to spiritual texts about Wicca, astrology, living off the land, and removing your own ego, along with how-to texts on carpentry, plumbing, gardening, raising chickens, basic wiring. He felt he was getting a firm grasp on the lofty tenets of the former set of books but was still struggling with the practical aspects of the latter. He would never admit it, but Sally was an enormous help. Tools came alive in her hands and behaved like willing participants. When she was there, tasks were completed more than twice as fast and in a steady progression. And the results were sturdier, straighter, more complete.

One time Sally arrived with groceries instead of pizza, and together they made boiled dinner. As he washed and chopped vegetables under Sally’s direction, it occurred to Darius that he was having fun. Together, they groaned over the bland taste of the parsnips, cabbage, and potatoes and the rough texture of the poor cut of meat. Darius plucked a jar of mustard out of the mostly empty refrigerator and a shaker of salt from the vacant cabinet, and they smirked as they slathered and sprinkled the condiment and spice on their dinner. Sally told him stories of her grandmother pouring vodka into her orange juice in the morning and buying herself a chainsaw on the way home from her husband’s funeral because he never let her have one when he was alive. Darius laughed and then realized he could not remember the last time he’d done so.