Chapter 6 — Krista

I made friends with Krista the way you make friends with a spooked animal, slow and sideways, over weeks, asking nothing.

At first it was just the mail — a lot of official envelopes, the kind I know too well, the county-assistance kind, the past-due kind, the kind that tells a whole hard story through the return addresses.

Then it was a wave from the porch.

Then it was, one hot afternoon, her toddler Rennie toddling down toward my truck to see the “mail lady,” and me keeping a butterscotch in the cup holder from then on, with the mother’s permission, and that was the crack that let the rest in.

Krista was twenty-four and from three states away, had followed a man out here who hadn’t stayed, and was marooned now in a rented house at the end of the world with a baby and no people and eleven dollars till the next check.