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“Actually, I won’t be paying, not at first. I’ll make my contribution by helping Evelyn fix up the place.”

Mother punched her fists into the bread she was kneading. “What do either of you girls know about renovating a house?”

“I know neither one of us is afraid to get her hands dirty, and Evelyn will hire help when she needs it.”

“She’ll need help all right,” Mother muttered, giving the dough a final thwack.

We did need help, those first few years, but mostly we did things ourselves. After running off the racoons, we set up the front bedroom as if it were yours alone. The middle bedroom became your study, furnished with the kilim rug, leather armchair, and brass lamp you brought up from the city, along with a recruiting poster from the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve you hung above the secretary desk where you did your writing. The back bedroom was ostensibly the space I rented, even though its bed was the one we shared.

Once we were settled in, we got to work making the house watertight and warm enough for winter. We followed the advice Henry and Ottalie Williams doled out in Old American Houses and How to Restore Them as religiously as the Bible. To keep the rain from blowing in, I fixed broken windowpanes with new glass and fresh putty and sharp glazing points. To stop the roof from leaking, I held on to that rickety ladder while you replaced missing slates. An electrician Daddy worked with at the bottling plant got the old knob-and-tube wiring working until we eventually had it replaced with Romex. Luckily, all the ancient furnace needed to rumble back to life was a bit of kindling and a belly full of coal.

Bigger jobs required skilled labor and specialized machinery, which cost money that we earned slower and spent faster than either one of us expected. New York Telephone had to run a new line from Ridgetop Road in order to give our address its first-ever phone number. It was two years before we could afford to have a proper well drilled and a septic system installed. It became a running joke between us that the Soviets had launched a satellite into space while we were still shitting in an outhouse. Those years of pumping cold well water and cooking over a wood fire must have been a misery, but I don’t remember being miserable. Mostly, it was an adventure, and we were having it together, and that’s all that mattered back then, wasn’t it?

It helped, of course, that Mother had us over for dinner every Sunday, after which she’d launder our clothes in her machine while we took turns taking hot showers. You felt guilty leaning on my parents like that, but I reminded you that even Henry David Thoreau stepped away from his cabin on Walden Pond to enjoy home-cooked meals at Emerson’s table.

We’d never have finished the bathroom without Daddy’s help. Billy pitched in, too, mixing grout and laying tiles, and didn’t it do my heart good to see the two of them working together instead of at odds for once? The old-timers at the tavern joked about the two women on Ridgetop Road who were playing at being handymen when they ought to have been looking for husbands, but once Daddy got on board, they came around. For a while there, our house was something of a community project, with people donating supplies and lending a hand. I still remember coming home from the library one evening to find a clawfoot tub left at our front door with a note that said, Heard you girls needed a bath.

By the time Cuba fell to Castro, we had hot tap water, a functioning toilet, and our own washing machine in the basement. Needing a break, we hired Billy to paint the house’s exterior at the minimum wage of one dollar an hour. On Saturdays when Daddy came to help, Mother would bring a picnic of cold chicken and potato salad. Seeing my family all together and at peace filled my heart with gratitude for you moving to Schuywich.

Because I’d always treated Billy the way I thought a mother ought to, you became the big sister he never had. He’d have moved in with us in a heartbeat if we’d let him, but our need for privacy was paramount. Billy did stay with us that week Daddy was hospitalized after putting a bullet through his leg in what everyone pretended was a hunting accident. Even though he slept on the couch downstairs, we couldn’t risk sharing a bed while my brother was in the house. I hated going up the back stairs to my room alone. We were both relieved when Daddy was released with a limp and a cane and needing Billy’s help at home. Do you remember how we made love that first night we had the house to ourselves again? When Mr. Sprague stopped by the next day to warn us of foxes screaming in the woods, I blushed, thinking it was my cries he’d heard.

I dismissed Billy’s obsession with Emil Zátopek as a weird phase he’d grow out of, but you read up on long-distance running and bicycled behind him with a stopwatch as he trained. You even invented a cash prize that you deposited into his college fund when he completed his first marathon. When Billy’s growth spurt stretched his spindly legs tall, it was thanks to you that he was ready to make the most of his long runner’s strides. In high school, his awkwardness melted away once he joined the track team and brought home a state championship for the Schuywich Warlocks. He became so popular, Mother groused he only stopped home to eat and sleep, but Billy always found time for you.

It wasn’t because you were easy on him. Sometimes, you weren’t even all that nice. When you taught him to drive that old Jeep of yours, you cursed like a stevedore as he ground the gears and stalled the engine. After he finally got the hang of it, what did you do for his sixteenth birthday but give him the keys and tell him the Jeep was his? Sure, he appreciated your generosity, but the real reason Billy loved you so much was because you took him seriously.

I remember the two of you huddled together in front of our staticky television watching that special news report on the violence inflicted on the Freedom Riders in Alabama. He’d never have recognized the insidious symbolism of the white carnation in Governor Patterson’s lapel if you hadn’t pointed it out to him. When Billy read in the paper that American planes were spraying jungle foliage in Vietnam, you lent him Rachel Carson’s new book, Silent Spring, and encouraged him to come to his own conclusions about the chemicals our government claimed were harmless. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mother wouldn’t so much as switch on the radio for fear of triggering one of Daddy’s attacks, so Billy came to our house to watch Kennedy address the nation. My lanky brother sat cross-legged on the floor as our president informed us Soviet nuclear missiles were in our hemisphere, your strong hands resting reassuringly on his shoulders. He was a freshman at Cornell when President Kennedy was assassinated, the young men in his dormitory all weeping like children. When it was Billy’s turn to use the telephone, you were the one he called.

Oh, Evelyn. I got the idea for writing these letters from a pamphlet I picked up in Dr. Singh’s office. I bring them to you as if they’ve come in the mail, missives from a wider world that hasn’t forgotten you exist. Reading them is supposed to stimulate your memory, but you rarely get through more than a few lines before returning them to their envelopes. If I try to take them back, though, you hang on tight, insist they’re yours, swear you’ll read them later. Where you end up hiding them, I have no idea.

Whether or not these letters are helping you hang on to the past, I know what they’re doing to me: dredging up all my past regrets about Billy and my parents and how everything fell apart. But Dr. Singh says it’s important for me to lay out our lives for you to remember, so I’ll keep on writing them, no matter how much they hurt my heart.

With all my love on Valentine’s Day, Hazel

Chapter 14

It wasn’t a nurse on the phone last night but a high school girl from the village, Aisha Green. She said her grandmother got my number from the real estate agent who sold me Red Barn Books and was there, maybe, a summer internship opportunity? There was no internship, obviously. I told her there was barely a business yet. But Aisha was persistent, politely but firmly swatting away my objections until I agreed she could come by the bookshop to make her case. As for David’s effects? I spent sleepless hours lamenting the fact they’re likely lost to me forever.

To jolt myself from my morning stupor, I stay under the cold spray of the shower long enough to thoroughly wash and condition my hair. The jets of unheated well water are sharp as a tattooist’s needle. My heart responds to the onslaught by pumping blood to the underside of my skin, heating me up from the inside out. My mother used to subject herself to cold showers on her darkest days, her shrieks eerily amplified by the bathroom’s tiles. As a girl, I couldn’t fathom why she would torture herself like that. Today, though, I appreciate the shock of freezing water as a method for externalizing pain.

It’s better than cutting, I think, stepping out of the tub and grabbing a towel. That’s what I used to do, during my tormented teenage years, whenever the anxiety that had taken root in my gut sprouted a new shoot. I was fifteen when my father caught me painting a red line along my inner thigh with his razor blade. Was it dumb luck, or had I left the bathroom door ajar in a gambit to be saved? Either way, the look of terror on his face as he made me swear never to cut myself again rendered my promise binding as an oath. My English teacher, who assumed the poem I wrote later was inspired by Sylvia Plath, picked out the line “red ink writes her epitaph” for particular praise.

It’s strange how life works, isn’t it? That was the poem that got me placed into Advanced English, where I wrote a short story that won a school contest, catching the attention of the overworked guidance counselor who called me down to her office to tell me I was too smart for the vocational classes I’d requested for junior year. “If you stay on the college track, Audrey, you could be a teacher, or maybe even a writer. You’d be wasting your talents as a carpenter,” the counselor said, curling her lip as if I’d asked for instruction in exotic dancing. “Whatever gave a clever girl like you the idea to select that program?” Sensing she would be unimpressed by my father’s trade, I mumbled something about Thoreau’s cabin and slunk out of her office.

Would I have been better off if I’d become a woodworker instead of a wordsmith? Maybe, maybe not. I loved working for my dad in the summers, kept it up all through college until I went out to Iowa for grad school. But I loved writing, too. I got the same satisfaction from finding the perfect word to bring an image to life as I did from fitting a piece of millwork precisely into place. Structuring a story requires its own kind of architecture, too. Though I admired the ornate houses I helped my father restore, for Dad’s Apprentice I chose a modernist aesthetic, with straightforward syntax and vernacular vocabulary. Reviewers appreciated what one called the “generative juxtaposition” between my memoir’s sad scenes and its spare style. Another compared it to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a sentiment I found embarrassingly overblown but that my editor insisted on reprinting as a cover blurb.

The crunch of tires on gravel draws me out of my thoughts and over to the window. I’m relieved to see a brown sedan in the driveway instead of Joe Sprague’s truck, but I wonder who it could be at this hour. It’s too early for Aisha’s visit. Sandra said she’d stop by in the afternoon for those plant medicine books. I hope it isn’t Joe’s wife, Nancy, pie in hand, come to proselytize her heathen neighbor.

Wren Ferguson gets out of the car, spots me in the window, and waves. Relieved, I wave back before remembering I’m wearing nothing but a towel. I step away, embarrassed. After rubbing deodorant under my arms and twisting my wet hair into a bun, I consider clothes. I still haven’t gone to the village laundromat and there’s not much for me to choose from. I end up picking a wrinkled sundress off the floor and pulling it over my head.

“Good morning,” Wren says, backing up as I step outside. “What happened to the moss?”

I’m confused. “What moss?”

“On the brick path.”

My eyes follow his pointed finger. The moss that was so lush and green yesterday is shriveled and black between the red bricks. I remember Joe saying he’d sprayed the walkway as if he’d done me a special favor. What an asshole, I think, silently rehearsing the conversation where I tell him not to use herbicides from now on.

“Anyway,” Wren says, “I was thinking about that latte you made me and wondered if your café might be open for business?”