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“That’s why I was hoping you would help,” Darius said, smiling at her now. “Your experience and training. I thought that’s how you’d fit in.”

Fit in.
Sally choked on the phrase.
Fit in? To his master plan?

She was appalled. “Darius, I work with these kids all day,” she said calmly. “The very last thing I want to do is live with them.”

“Well, I do want to live with them. And help them. I believe I can offer them something. Something unique and life altering.”

“Darius, you have good intentions, a big ego, and a shelf of self-help books,” Sally said, even though she didn’t believe there was an ounce of generosity in his ambitions. “I’m afraid that’s not going to cut it.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Sally, if you saw someone drowning in a pool and wanted to jump in to save them, I wouldn’t try to stop you just because you’re not trained as a lifeguard.”

“But because I’m
not
a lifeguard, there’s a good chance I’d drown us both!” Sally said, exasperated.

“I will not turn away from them. Everyone else has. They need me.”

“You are in over your head,” Sally told him. “Growing tomatoes, making clay coffee mugs, and shivering under a tarp in the mud for a few nights will not fix what’s wrong with these people.”

“It’s better than what their parents are giving them,” Darius insisted. “Frozen dinners and reality TV. All creating desires for things they can’t and won’t ever have. This is what causes their sickness. This longing for all these material things. This is what leads them to drugs and other efforts to over- or understimulate their senses.”

“Oh my, Darius,” Sally said, drawing out the words, trying to tamp down her impatience. “What gobbledygook, New-Age crap have you been reading now? Just because you attended rich-boy camp does not make you a survival expert. Rowing crew at prep school does not qualify you to lead canoe voyages in the backcountry. Volunteering once with Habitat for Humanity because you needed the community-service credit does not mean you can rewire this house. Taking a few psychology courses at college does not prepare you for helping kids deal with low IQs, grinding poverty, and being slapped, kicked, or fucked by their fathers.”

“There’s no need to be so coarse,” Darius sniffed.

“Coarse?” Sally said, exasperated. “You think this is romantic. To you it’s just a game. This is no fucking game to them. This is real life for these kids. You have means, money, and rich parents. But what happens to them when they get tired of living out here with you, when they bust a finger or burn something down or start fighting with each other or just want their goddamn Game Boy back? Then they have to go back to their fucked-up families with no skills, no education, no jobs, and no fucking teeth. You get to stay in your little trust-funded utopia and do it all over again.”

Darius stood suddenly, dropping his book to the floor. For a moment, Sally thought he might cross the room and slap her. Or better, tear off his clothes so they could fuck their way out of this conversation.

Wrong man,
she reminded herself.

That was how things got resolved with her previous boyfriend.

Darius’s hands were balled into fists at his sides, and his jaw was clenched. Sally pushed herself farther into her chair. He stepped toward her, kicking Robert Bly in the head as he approached. He stopped. The sound of his teeth grinding against one another and the warm, moist air of late summer rattling through his nostrils was the only thing Sally heard.

“You’re a hard bitch, Sally,” he finally said.

“You’re an arrogant fool, Darius,” she returned.

After that night, that conversation, there was not a day that Sally did not think about leaving, moving out, putting it all behind her. But she stayed. She was protecting her investment, she told herself. She was keeping an eye on things. She was doing it for the money, because if she left, Darius might stop paying and she’d have the hassle of evictions to deal with. Plus, staying there meant free rent. She had multiple student loans, had run up her credit cards on basic living expenses, and had two ill, inactive parents living in a modular home and collecting disability—her father for a back strain sustained when he tried to break up a fight at the prison where he had been a guard for twenty-three years, her mother for an infection she picked up as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, which, combined with her obesity and diabetes, had meant they had to amputate her foot. Sally had a brother out there somewhere but hadn’t seen or heard from him in several years. He had disappeared following yet another drug arrest. He was no help, but at least he was no longer a hassle.

Darius set up a bedroom for himself in the attic. Behind a door he kept locked, Sally noticed one day when she tried to snoop. She kept the room they had once shared and was left to use the small bathroom next to it by herself. The rest of the women filled the other two bedrooms with bunk beds and mattresses on the floor and took turns in the larger bathroom. Given Darius’s long hair, facial scruff, and smell of garlic and sweat, it seemed he rarely groomed himself at all.

The changing cast of characters living in the house shifted their weight aside when Sally passed by, a shoal of fish in the presence of a shark. They avoided eye contact and stopped talking among themselves whenever she came into the room. Without decree, she was left half a shelf in the refrigerator and part of a shelf in the pantry—her very few grocery items a stark, shiny, prepackaged contrast to the messy comingling of dirty vegetables, jars of homemade yogurt, bottles of green smoothies, blocks of tempeh and tofu, and bags of nuts and grains that cluttered most of the shelves. Her name was removed from the community meal calendar.

Darius smiled at her politely when they were near each other, left a check in her room every month for the mortgage—always on time—but said almost nothing to her. She tried to think of ways to engage him in a discussion about what he was doing. She wanted to explain things to him, to get through to him, to get him to understand what she knew to be true about the errors of his ways. But he, too, always shifted away from her, making conversation impossible. So she began to avoid the house and its occupants. She worked long hours, ate out, went to the movies, and joined a sportsmen’s club where she took up archery and killed time in the clubhouse. But she couldn’t stay entirely away. Nor, truthfully, did she want to. She felt compelled to come home and watch what was happening from what she considered a safe, noncommittal distance. Some days, she thought what was unfolding was an elaborate comedy. Other days, she feared it was a tragedy.

Lying in bed one night, staring at the ceiling, wondering why she was still there, Sally finally said to herself,
Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m here because I’m curious. I’m here because I want to see what happens. I’m here because I want to watch it all fall apart.

DARIUS AND MIRANDA

Miranda met Darius at the farmers’ market. She had been toying with the idea of bringing in some of her own vegetables for resale. Maybe making pies. Or jams. Something. Doing something. She was at the farmers’ market not to buy vegetables—she had her own enormous garden, well tended and overflowing with produce, much of which she ended up giving away—but to see what others were selling. She was trying to find out if there was a niche there she might fill.

What a metaphor for the rest of my life,
she thought.

She paused at a funny little table in a far corner of the grassy field where the market was held because that particular stand was set slightly apart, and so attracted her attention. Or maybe she stopped simply because it was at the end of the line. Maybe because she was tired. Vaguely frustrated. Unsure if she’d found any answers or direction. This miasma of conflicting emotions was becoming familiar, a feeling that seemed to waft in on an errant breeze and then cling, like the tangy smell of manure. It was hard to shake off. She stopped to try and ground her buzzing nerves as much as to examine the odd assortment of wares.

“What’s your name?”

Miranda looked into the azure eyes and intense stare of the man sitting at the table.

“Miranda,” she replied reflexively, surprised and rattled by the abruptness of his question. “They call me Andy.”

She regretted adding that last bit. There was no “they” anymore. Only her parents had ever called her Andy. And her brother. She hadn’t even liked the nickname. It had made her feel young, small, vulnerable. She could not articulate, was not fully aware, that the man behind the card table, under the makeshift tent, made her feel the same way.

“Well, Andy,” he said, drawing out the first vowel, teasing her or maybe taunting her somehow, “can I interest you in some of our wares?” He swept his arm a few inches above a collection of small jars and twists of metal and scraps of wood on his scarred table. “We have homemade jams, totally organic, from berries foraged locally.”

Miranda made her own jam from berries she gathered herself. The scrawled handwriting on the labels and the lids left askew made her smile. He obviously did not know much about canning. She thought his naïveté charming. There was nothing here that she wanted or needed. But she was reluctant to move on. She felt his eyes on her face as she feigned polite interest, picking things up and setting them down again.

“Miranda,” he said. “That’s familiar to me somehow. You are familiar to me somehow. Surely we’ve met before.”

Miranda tried for a light laugh, tried to compress the expansive feeling that was coming over her. “I don’t think so,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve seen your stand.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Well. Perhaps in a past life, then.”

A past life. Silly, but maybe. Why not?
Miranda thought as she picked up a twist of wire.

“What is this?” she asked.

“This . . .” he said, letting his breath out as a long pause, as if he was about to reveal something mysterious.

Miranda waited for him to finish his sentence. Instead he stood, reached across the table, lifted her hand from where it hung at her side, and slipped the object onto her finger. She was surprised at how soft his hands were. She was surprised at how warm they were. And at how beautiful the thin strip of matte metal looked on her finger.

“This is for you,” he said.

Miranda felt herself flush at the intimacy of the gesture. Then his voice rattled on, the tone changed now, official and practiced. A sales pitch.

“We make all our jewelry from found objects,” he said. “Everything is upcycled. We even make our own tools.”

We. Miranda pictured a slightly scowling, unwashed hippie wife, a brightly colored bandanna wrapped around long dreadlocks embedded with stone beads and pieces of silver.

“The income from these products supports our other efforts,” he continued.

Miranda’s hand rested in his, a small weight lightly held. She felt rooted to the spot, the moment. His eyes. So clear, so blue, so empty, framed by the ropes of his dark hair falling around his face. Somehow, he had pinned her down by putting the ring on her finger. She wondered, fleetingly, what he meant by the phrase “other efforts.” Then he abruptly dropped her hand, stood back, and scanned her face. It seemed he was looking for something that wasn’t there.

“Keep it,” he said, wiping his hands together as if they were dirty.

“No, I couldn’t . . .” she stumbled. “Let me pay for it.”

“No,” he said, his voice suddenly deeper, authoritative. “Keep it.” His smile was a contortion of his lips. “It will give you something to remember me by.”

And then he was gone. He was still there, standing in front of her, but he had turned away, and in that instant dismissed her, his attention on someone behind her, someone she had not noticed. A small woman with a scruff of short, stiff hair, her hands full of wares from the table. Or was she adding them to the table? This other woman’s expression, cold and suspicious, spooked Miranda, and she scuttled away, trying to collect thoughts that had become tangled like dead leaves and twigs swirling in an eddy. She went to the next aisle, reminding herself what she had come here to get: some coffee beans from the new guy who roasted them himself in his home. Some tomatoes, as the blight had gotten to hers—they were always hard to grow in this climate, but the wet summer had been brutal. A chicken, or anything to vary the slabs of venison that still filled the freezer from last fall. She hoped the goat cheese had not sold out yet. Perhaps a bouquet of flowers. Yes, that would brighten the table, the room.

As she walked away she realized, with just a passing thought, that she had not gotten the man’s name. She twisted the ring with her thumb and realized she hadn’t even said thank you.

Not to worry,
she told herself.
He’ll be here next weekend. I’ll bring him something in exchange. I’ll make him something. Something special.

Not Dix. It was not Dix for whom she’d make something special, for whom she was always making something special. This was an odd, uncomfortable, and yet strangely exhilarating idea. It would be for this other man. This man who as yet didn’t even have a name.