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He was through talking now, Miranda could tell. That had been unusual for him, saying that much, in that way, about a person he did not know. He would not condemn. Not unless he had the facts. And even if the facts were bad, he would simply avoid that person. Until he or she was in actual need or trouble. Then he would step up, as he always did. His straightforward civility had always been a marvel to Miranda. She wondered why it was starting to be an irritation.

“Yes,” Miranda said into the quiet that had settled between them. “I know how town people are. How much they gossip. How little they care for the damage their meanness can do to people.”

As much as she was trying to stay cheerful, she allowed her voice to become rancid with memories. She had almost stopped going into town because she was tired of how what started as idle chitchat so often wheedled itself into questions that were designed to extract incriminating information. Someone asked how her mother was, even though Miranda suspected they already knew she’d died, robbed of her senses by strokes. People continued to ask what had ever happened to her father’s house, did she know who bought it, what was going to happen with it, even though it was long abandoned. They asked where she was living, knowing that she was with Dix, and then expressed surprise that she was “still” there.

She had learned that her answers, which she had once given so freely and without thought, would often become some other person’s currency, something they traded, after considerable embellishment, to show that they knew what others did not. She had experienced too many times the discomfort and pain, the feelings of hurt and treachery, when someone remarked on some aspect of her life but gave it a sinister and spiteful twist.

“Heard you made a pretty penny when you sold that land,” someone she barely knew said to her in the hardware store.

“Never did understand how your dad got the rights to build what he did up there,” another person remarked as she picked up a package at the post office.

“Guess that nursing home didn’t take such good care of your mom.”

“You musta learned by now that Dix just ain’t the marrying kind.”

“You still here? Thought you’d move back to Connecticut by now.”

“Must be nice not having to work or nothing.”

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Dix had tried to explain that certain sorts of scarcity and ignorance could make people want others to do poorly instead of well, could make them suspicious and resentful. But it didn’t help. Miranda was stung and bruised by their comments. She found herself staying increasingly at home. She gardened, canned, cooked, and baked. Tried to learn to sew and knit. Watched the chickens scratching in the yard. Had considered having a pig but knew she’d get too attached to butcher it. When she did go into town, she tried to go at off hours, when there were fewer people at the post office or store. Sometimes she sat in the library, leafing through picture books as if she were a child, but when the real children arrived after school let out, she would get up from the table, return her books to the shelf, and head home.

She felt isolated, almost caged by the boundaries of her life on Dix’s twenty acres. But at the same time she felt safe because the thick trees and old fencing that marked the perimeter were a frame that kept others out as much as they kept her in. Her forays to the farmers’ market had been the start of an effort to find a new way out of her self-imposed walls.

“I’ve never met the guy,” Dix said, unexpectedly taking up the thread of their stalled conversation as he turned into a steep driveway. “So I can’t say much about him. But if he’s taking in kids in trouble or from crappy homes, I have no beef. There certainly are plenty of those around here. Anything to get them away from getting popped upside the head all the time. Or worse.”

He threw the truck into park in front of a mammoth log home not dissimilar from the one her father had built.

“I’ve met him.”

Miranda’s words surprised her. She waited for Dix to react, to ask her something. She watched the side of his face. The creases around his eyes seemed deeper than she remembered. There were discolorations that were not quite freckles here and there. He kept looking out the windshield, staring hard ahead of him at nothing in particular.

“Really?” he finally said.

Miranda listened for false nonchalance but couldn’t find any. She wondered if that was because there was none or because he was better at hiding it than she was.

“Where?”

“At the farmers’ market,” she replied, finding herself unable to say more.

It was Dix who had suggested she go to the market. It was he who suggested she sell her pies. Extras from their garden. Maybe make some sweaters, even though she was still struggling to learn to knit. She knew he was really just encouraging her to get out more. To meet people. To have a life beyond him and their property and worrying about when, or whether, she’d get pregnant. She knew he felt that she needed to find something productive to do. She also knew he was undoubtedly right. But she felt herself in some kind of enervating psychic quicksand. She was embarrassed to think of how many days she lay in bed long after Dix had headed out in the morning, of how many afternoons she spent staring out windows for hours at a time.

Dix had pointed out that most of the people who went to the farmers’ market were summer people, not locals. Miranda knew that “summer people” was his code for those who talked only about people back home in Connecticut or Long Island or New Jersey. To them, the locals were just servers at the club, fishing guides, house cleaners, caretakers, and driveway plowers. People good with tools and machinery and not much else. People with bad teeth, poor grammar, and even worse parenting skills. They both knew this was how her father and mother had viewed the locals. This was how they had even seen Dix, she hated to admit, in spite of his excellent diction, reliability, and mouth full of straight, white teeth. In spite of how much they depended upon him. Dix was staring at her now, his dark green eyes silently asking her to continue her story about how she met the man by the side of the road. She had to swallow hard against an unexpected wad of dread and emotion that had lodged in her throat.

“He seemed nice enough,” Miranda said carefully. “Not crazy or anything. Just selling jams and crafts. I guess he was a little, I don’t know, intense. I didn’t know he was taking in kids. That’s really nice.”

She found herself registering the location of the mailbox where she’d seen him. Found herself thinking of the route they’d taken to get here. Wondered if she had any business up this way. If she could find a reason to come back. Ridiculous, of course. They were out in the middle of nowhere. There was no reason for her to be on this road on her own, only because she was riding along with Dix. She also found herself searching for something else. She wasn’t sure what it was until she heard what next came out of her mouth.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” she said.

“You’ve always wanted to do what?” Dix asked. “Take in juvenile delinquents?”

There was a faint smirk in his remark. Maybe Miranda’s insecurity caused her to imagine the whiff of a sneer. She had a brief flash of panic that he was mad at her for something. But he was never mad. Mad was not something he did.

“No, not that,” she said. “Not foster care or anything.” She was making this up as she went along. Yet, as she said the words, she realized she was expressing an until-then-unrealized desire. “More like a Big Sister kind of thing. A mentor thing. You know.” These revelations were surprising, and relieving her of something at the same time. “I never had a little sister. Always wanted one.”

This was not really a true statement, she knew. She’d loved being the baby sister to her big brother. It was a role she would not have willingly given up. But now that he was gone, her parents were gone, a kind of long-delayed but achingly deep desolation had descended upon her. Being with Dix had kept it at bay for a time. She hoped having a baby would drive the feeling away forever. That wasn’t happening, and she was struggling to find some way to keep this latent sadness from consuming her.

“I’ve thought about joining one of those programs,” she said, a statement also not wholly true. “I don’t think they’d be right for me. Those formal programs.”

Dix turned his body toward her and his expression, full of the deep and thoughtful consideration she so admired in him, was now both encouraging and intimidating to her.

“I just like kids,” she said.

She felt tears gather in her eyes. She blinked them back. She knew she was picking at the edges of the wound between them, but it was a wound she thought affected only herself. She was also working her way toward something. She was testing him and testing something between them.

“I wonder,” she said cautiously. “I wonder if that guy needs any help out there. With the kids.” There. She had said it and she couldn’t take it back. “Maybe I should stop by sometime.” She heard her words as if they’d been said by a different person. “See what they’re up to. Maybe I could help out. Tutor. Maybe. Maybe I could find out if I’m any good. Good, you know, with young people.”

Dix’s eyes, which looked as if they’d absorbed their color from the mountains around them, drifted from her face to the house to the woods and back to her face. Miranda stopped talking and waited on him, afraid of what he might say. Afraid of what she’d just said. Finally he reached out and wrapped his long, heavily knuckled fingers around hers where they were fluttering nervously on her thigh.

“Honey,” he said, leaning toward her, “I’m sure you’ll be good with them. They’ll love you.” He reached up and rubbed her cheek with the back of his hand. “They’ll love you just like everyone does. Just like I do.”

He patted her hand. Then he smiled, rolled his neck, opened the truck door, and got out. Enough talk. Time for work. She stayed where she was.

His answer was so like him, she thought. So sweet and right and full of hope and promise and confidence in her. Why then, she wondered, full of frustration and bile, did it make her feel so weak, so inadequate, so much like bursting into tears?

A
rash developed under Miranda’s ring. Thinking it was some sort of reaction to the metal, she changed her dish soap. That didn’t help. She tried painting the inside of the band with clear nail polish, but it wore off quickly and the bloom of small, itchy bumps and dry, flaky skin came back. She told herself to just take the ring off, put it away. It was nothing special. But she resisted removing it. She’d hold her hand out in front of her face and admire the way the ring accentuated her finger, gave her delicate hand some heft. The ring was symbolic of something, meant something to her beyond mere adornment. She knew it was trying to tell her something; she just wasn’t sure what it was. The rash added another layer to the mystery message. However, instead of listening to it, she fought against it. She’d remove the ring, leave it in a drawer for a few days while the rash cleared up. She’d apply some Bag Balm and then try it on again. Nothing worked.

One day she was clawing through the soft, cool, crumbly potato mounds, feeling around for the firm bumps of the hiding tubers, hoping to find a few end-of-season stragglers. Her fingers landed on a cluster of small potatoes. She laced her forefinger and thumb around the clump and pulled them through the earth. She knew, the minute they were free, before she’d settled them in her basket and wiped the dirt from her hands, before she even looked, that the ring was gone. Left behind in the potato mound. She had no desire to search for it.

Now I know where it is,
she thought.
Now I know it’s safe.

The irritation cleared up, but her thumb still searched for the ring. She still itched at the fresh, smooth skin. Her hands were restless and so was she. Dix was busier than usual with end-of-season chores. She could find little to engage herself, and the hours between when he left and returned dragged. The light was low, with the morning darkness lingering and the evening gloom rushing in before its time. It was often difficult for her to judge what part of the day she was in. Was it time for breakfast or for afternoon tea? The tasks she had once enjoyed—weeding, cleaning, canning, trying a new recipe, making some fresh curtains, learning to knit—went undone or remained half finished, their former charms falling flat for her. Time seemed to be not an opportunity but a void.

Then Dix went away for a week to do some work on a property up near the Canadian border. Miranda’s days were now not even punctuated by the simple fact of him, by waiting for his lanky frame and slightly bowlegged gait to appear in the early evening, his knobby fingers running through his unkempt hair. It was into the long emptiness of the fourth morning after he left that she found herself in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at her just-washed face.

“Enough stalling and wasting away,” she said out loud.

She gave her hair a brisk brushing, pulled a few strands into a barrette, wiped some gloss on her lips, and walked to her car. She retraced the drive she’d taken with Dix weeks earlier, made a few wrong turns and had to double back, but eventually she found the unmarked black and rusty mailbox on its canted post. She stopped and stared at it. No cars appeared in her rearview mirror, and none passed on the other side of the dirt road. She could sit here in her idling car as long as she wanted. She could keep driving and wend her way down these unfamiliar, narrow roads back to the comfort of her home. A comfort she had once snuggled into but that now felt stifling.