"I've never been to Millard."
"Most people haven't."
I pick up the spoon again. I eat slowly. My lungs still hurt. Every fourth or fifth breath brings up a small cough.
"I don't have anywhere to go," I say.
I say it flat, not asking. Just the fact.
"No," she says. "I know."
"Everything was in that house."
"Yes."
"I don't have my wallet. My car keys. My passport. My medication."
"I know."
"I don't have anyone to call."
I am not sure this is true in the strictest sense. I have a father on Long Island. I have a friend in London. I have an attorney in Redwater City whose name I could probably remember if I sat with it for ten minutes. What I don't have is anyone I could call at seven in the morning the day after my house burned down and expect to be met with anything resembling love. And what I realize, saying the sentence to a woman I met two hours ago, isthat this is the most honest sentence I have spoken to another human being in years.
She watches me.
"You don't have to decide anything right now," she says. "You're safe here. I don't need the bed back. I don't need the chair. I'll be at the station most of the day. You can sleep. You can eat. The fridge is yours. There's a woodstove, there's hot water, there's a bath. If you need a doctor, I'll drive you into Millard. If you want me to drive you into the city when you're ready, I'll do that too. You don't owe me anything."
Her face doesn't change while she says this. She says it the way you would read out a list of items on a checklist, one after the other, and at the end of it I understand that she is not performing kindness. She is giving me options. She is a woman who has spent a career giving people with no options some options, and she is giving me mine now, and it is the first time in a long time that somebody has set a thing in front of me that was not already shaped by what they wanted me to do.
"I think," I say, "I would like to stay a day or two. If that's all right?”
"That's all right."
"Until I can think."
"Until you can think."
"I don't have clothes."
"I said. Top drawer."
"I meant, real clothes."
"I know what you meant." A small beat. She doesn't quite smile. Something at the corner of her mouth moves a quarter inch and settles. "Once you're ready, I can drive to Millard and pick something up. Jeans. Sweater. Underthings. Tell me sizes."
"Later," I say.
"Later."
---
By afternoon I am in her kitchen in a pair of her sweats rolled at the ankle and a flannel shirt two sizes too big, and I am washing the oatmeal bowl at the sink because she told me I didn't have to and I wanted to anyway. The shirt smells like cedar and like the soap I don't recognize, and the sleeves come down past my knuckles, and I have rolled them up the way a girl rolls the sleeves of a brother's shirt. I have never had a brother. I have never worn any man's shirt but Daniel's, and Daniel's shirts always came back from the cleaner's with a crease at the cuff I was not allowed to wrinkle.
I wrinkle this one. I dry my hands on it.
Out the kitchen window the light has turned gray between the pines. The rain Max promised is starting, soft at first, dotting the needles. The woodstove is going. The cabin smells of woodsmoke and of the stew Max has started in a cast-iron pot for later, beef and onions and something bay-leafed. No staff has cooked this. No staff has laid out this table. There is no table setting. There is a kitchen towel, and there is a spoon in a pot, and there is a woman who saved me from a fire sitting on the step of the porch outside, boots off, lacing a spare pair.
I watch her through the window.
