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She talked while we worked. I mostly didn’t. She wanted to know how long I’d had the barn, and I told her a while. When she asked if I’d built the pumpkin on the courthouse postcard, I said yes. I didn’t answer at all when she asked whether I’d always been an artist. She didn’t seem to mind. She hummed under her breath and kept carrying.

She carried more than I thought she would. She didn’t complain once, not even when a box of old hardware split open on the landing and she had to pick up screws one by one off the stairs.

By ten o’clock the room was mostly clear. Under the last drop cloth, there was a bed frame and a mattress still in its plastic, a small table, and two chairs. The kitchen was just a sink, the oven that didn’t work, and a two-burner hot plate. One of the two windows looked straight down into the shop. The other let in more light and had a view of the gravel drive and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.

“This is nice,” she said.

It wasn’t. It was clean, and that was about it.

She’d gone to the corner for the last box and was crouched down beside it. When she stood up, she had a picture frame in her hands.

I knew what it was before she turned it around.

It was a page from a magazine. I was standing in a studio in Asheville that had twice the square footage of this barn, in a clean shirt, smiling. The headline called me one of the Southeast’s rising installation artists. There was a second name on the sign painted on the wall behind me. I didn’t look at that part.

“Is this you?” she asked.

“That goes in the trash pile.”

She looked at the photo a second longer. Then she looked at me.

I waited for the questions. I’d answered them before for reporters and clients and my father, and I’d hated every one of them.

She didn’t ask anything. She carried the frame downstairs and laid it face down on top of the trash pile. She was careful with it. Then she came back up and asked me how the hot water worked.

I should have been grateful. I wasn’t. It bothered me more than the questions would have.

“Run it a full ten minutes,” I said. “If the pipe bangs, that’s normal.”

“Ten minutes. Pipe bangs. Got it.”

“There’s a hardware store on Main if you need anything for up here.”

“I’ll be fine.” She smiled at me. “Thank you for letting me crash here.”

“It was in the agreement.” The one I hadn’t read.

“Still.”

I left her there. My cabin sat up the hill behind the barn, a hundred yards of dark path I could maneuver with my eyes shut. I didn’t turn on a lamp when I got inside. I didn’t need one.

From my kitchen window, I could see the window over the shop. Her light was still on.

Ten weeks. She’d be here ten weeks, and then she’d go back to Asheville and graduate and get a job somewhere with clean floors. She was temporary, like a lot of people in my life had been.

I turned and went to bed.

The next morning I handed her a stack of lath strips and a sanding block. Part of me waited for her to complain.

“How smooth do you want them?” she asked.

“Smooth enough that paper won’t snag.”

“Okay.”

I went back up the ladder. It was the most boring job in the shop, and I’d given it to her on purpose. I figured she’d be tired of it and give up inside an hour. When I came down almost two hours later, she’d finished the stack and started on a second one.

I picked up a strip and ran my thumb along it. It was better than I would have done.