Sublime

but then her little girl came along, and her little girl’s daddy left, and before you knew it . . . she was one of them. The needy.

Going out, she saw now, had been a mistake. This house, the house her father built, the house where her mother would die—this place was safe. This place knew her. This place was where she belonged.

Or maybe Francis, knowing he was going to disappear from his daughter’s life, had left these for her to find.

ornery.

freshman year, the year Jane’s grandmother died and Jane moved with her mother and sister into her grandmother’s house in Awadapquit.

“Clara used to work in infant wear,” the manager explains, “selling onesies.”

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone.

“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”