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  Ken switched the TV on and leaned back under the stock painting of tulips to watch Family Feud.

  Reluctantly, Cassidy jumped down and crawled onto the other bed next to Paloma.

  “I don’t want to go home in three days. Why would anyone want to go to Buckhannon?” she whined. “What is there to do in stupid Buckhannon?”

  “Hush,” Paloma said. “You’ll make your dad feel bad.”

  Cassidy’s face flashed with realization and then remorse. She settled on a stubborn pout as she looked over at Ken, who watched the heavy television set intently, not looking at either of them.

  Paloma had seen her own negativity in her daughter then, her own entitled dismissal of the privilege of quiet farm and forest. Ken had unwittingly turned Cassidy against Paloma, but Paloma had realized then that she had unintentionally turned her daughter against the simple beauty of their land and home.

  As she left West Virginia, gliding past the “Pennsylvania Welcomes You” sign, Paloma resolved to atone for these mistakes. Cassidy was giving her another chance and she would take it. She would help her daughter to be less invested in the opinions of others, and she would keep her own tendency to appear judgmental in check. Paloma would show Cassidy how loved she was and what a wonderful home West Virginia could be.

  Cassidy

  Stepping out of the airport into Pittsburgh’s early June air, Cassidy noticed humidity for the first time in her life. Growing up in this climate, she’d been oblivious—this was just what “hot” felt like. But after her time in the dry desert heat of Southern California, it felt like swimming.

  Paloma stood beside her car, smiling. It was a different drive from Pittsburgh to Buckhannon than the trip with Noeli, the sun illuminating not only the emerald green of the now lush hills, but the modern office buildings and new construction. Dilapidated shacks still appeared in the hollows occasionally, but they were the exception, not the rule.

  As they slid down the High-Tech Corridor, Cassidy wondered if the state could progress without being overrun. Could it change without being destroyed? Her friendship with Noeli apparently couldn’t.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the mention of Noeli’s name. “Huh?”

  “I was asking what happened with Noeli.” Paloma raised her sunglasses—which had been perched at the tip of her nose over her dollar-store reading glasses—to her head so she could get a better look at her daughter. “If you want to talk about it. Now that I understand your sexuality, I thought—”

  “You don’t understand my sexuality.” Cassidy looked out the window as they crossed a long bridge—a winding river flanked by a valley of trees so round and full, they could have been a pile of green sheep stretched below. Her chest felt tight.

  “I understand that it’s fluid, honey. We’re all somewhere along a spectrum.”

  “It’s not just that.” Cassidy continued looking out the window.

  Paloma put a hand on Cassidy’s leg, which began to shake with adrenaline. Soon the whole story came rushing out. “I like women. The Simon thing was a mistake. I am definitely not into sex with men in person, but I haven’t been driving Lyft for a long time. I do cam work—getting naked on camera for money, for men, and it’s not just a money thing. I enjoy it.”

  Paloma took a deep breath and nodded. She patted Cassidy’s leg. “It would take so much more than that to shock me, Cassidy. You’re fine. Totally fine.”

  Cassidy exhaled and closed her eyes. She’d been holding this for such a long time that she hadn’t realized it had manifested as tightness in her shoulders. The reaction she’d anticipated from Paloma, the secret judgment she’d known Noeli held, her own confusion about what it meant about her sexuality—she’d held it all in her body. Now, finally, she felt it begin to let go.

  “We need to switch your cell phone service to something that works here, but first I want a coffee drink,” Paloma said as they arrived in Buckhannon—her code for “expensive coffee.” Cassidy suspected it was also code for, “Let’s cheer you up.”

  Downtown seemed to shine. Art met Cassidy at every corner, gazed at her from shop windows, poked up from the flower beds, and beamed from brick walls. It was charming, and in that moment, Cassidy was truly, deeply happy to be there.

  She ached, though, in equal measure. Every mural, every cute shop, every young person with blue hair or dreadlocks—Cassidy wanted Noeli to see it all. She wanted to tell her more about her town’s transformation, to brag about how her generation had been the one to transform it. She wanted Noeli to be here so she could convince her to stay.

  Cassidy imagined Noeli here with her again, as her girlfriend this time, holding her hand as they looked at hand-carved chairs, sitting across from her and trying a flight of local beers. Cassidy put a hand on her belly and imagined it was Noeli’s hand. When the baby kicked in response, Cassidy wanted it to be Noeli who felt it. Paloma parked and together, she and Cassidy walked down the sparkling sidewalk to Stone Tower.

  “I wanted you to leave, Cassidy,” Paloma said after ordering her coffee. The other customers at the coffee shop buzzed around, discussing the Community Theater, Riverfest, the band playing in Traders Ally the next day. Behind the bar, plates clanked and the espresso machine hissed. It was as vibrant as any coffee shop in California, maybe more so, Cassidy thought, because people were talking to one another, and not to their phones. “But I always thought you might come back someday,” Paloma went on. She had said something similar during Cassidy’s last visit, but it hadn’t stuck like this. Then, it had felt to Cassidy like an excuse—a justification for leaving her daughter with the emotional burden of the farm. Now it felt like a celebration, a homecoming. “I’m so happy you’re here,” Paloma said.

  “How do you live with it?” Cassidy asked. “All of the history? Especially when you weren’t happy with Daddy?”

  Paloma thought for a long minute. “I made this place my home,” she finally said, her lip trembling. “Seeing you at home here made it my home. There are so many ways to love. You know, I had potential buyers out to look at the farm. They stomped around like they owned the place and talked about putting a deer head over the mantel and I was so relieved when they decided not to buy. I’m even more relieved you’ll be there after all. The farm is important to me.” She put her hands on Cassidy’s belly and tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. The baby moved, as if on command. The baby, in fact, had hardly stopped moving since they’d arrived in Buckhannon. It was like something inside her had woken up, like she knew this place, too.

  “Paloma,” the woman at the counter called. They went together to get their drinks.

  “Toasted coconut steamed soy milk,” the barista said as she tucked her purple hair behind her ear. Cassidy thanked her and took a sip. The sweet liquid warmed her throat and then her belly and the baby kicked again, leaving a foot pressing against her abdomen. Cassidy took Paloma’s hand and held it to the spot where the tiny foot pushed.

  “Ooh hoo hoo!” Paloma squealed, the exact sound she’d made watching Cassidy on rides at the Strawberry Festival each May, like she was amazed but also a little nauseous.

  They sat with their drinks at a little table facing Main. Across the street, painted strawberries still adorned the windows of Thompson’s Pharmacy from the festival the month before. Cassidy no longer cared what anyone in Buckhannon might think about her being back, about her being pregnant, about her being queer, because she had the approval of the person who mattered, the person who had always mattered. They finished their coffee and went back out to Main Street. A couple windows down was the nTelos store, and Cassidy followed Paloma in. Inside the small room, the walls lined with bright new screens, Paloma asked the teenager at the counter for the latest model smartphone and told him to add it to her family plan. The acne-scarred boy handed a chic white box to Cassidy and she took the device from its packaging.

  “If you like this one,
I’ll go ahead and get it all set up for ya,” he said. Cassidy stared at the phone’s screen, shiny and unblemished, and saw her image reflected back to her, whole. She’d forgotten what it felt like to see herself unfragmented.

  Paloma

  At the house, Paloma went upstairs to sift through more of Ken’s things. They’d built their relationship on the fact that they wanted children.

  It had felt solid, at first—an ancient mountain, a centuries-old bridge. The ordeal of conceiving and the triumph of success had buoyed Ken and Paloma for a long time.

  Though the wonder at their progeny never faded, the marvel of their collaboration in her conception did, and with time, wind and rain battered their hillsides and eroded their parapets. The largest threat—the gargantuan bucket-wheel excavator that threatened to strip the crumbling mine of their relationship—was the house.

  Jane had given them the farm when she moved into town to be closer to the hospital, where she still volunteered. Caring for the land as her own, rather than in exchange for lodging, renewed Paloma’s sense of purpose. The farmhouse was less cramped with just the three of them, but still Paloma worried about the safety of the outdated electricity and spoke like a martyr about her days potty training Cassidy in an outhouse.

  Ken drew plans with stubby architects’ pencils, and his line sketches sat in piles on every surface. Paloma moved the thin papers from the bed to the floor before crawling in to sleep, pausing to imagine how these lines, arrows, and numbers could transform into a three-dimensional structure.

  “How’s it coming?” she asked one morning as he scratched his beard over breakfast and studied the plans.

  “It’s coming,” Ken said.

  The next day he went to Home Hardware and priced nails, lumber, and drywall—jotting the numbers in the flip pad he kept in his back pocket. A week later he drove to the library and brought home books on structures around the world, everything from Iroquois longhouses to the hanok-style houses of Korea.

  “Hay clay!” he declared triumphantly at dinner.

  “I’m sorry?” Paloma asked.

  “Hay clay,” he repeated. “Insulation. It’s straw and clay. It lasts for seven hundred years.”

  “Sounds great.” Paloma passed him the green beans. How long would she have to hear about hay clay before he moved on to his next idea?

  “Hay clay! Hay clay!” Cassidy chanted, then caught Paloma’s eye and stopped. Paloma had noticed a change in her daughter lately—she’d grown self-conscious around her, as if she’d become aware of Paloma’s secret moments of resentment. Cassidy seemed to understand that she was not just the sun of her mother’s world but that she had to be. Paloma felt she’d broken her daughter. She’d failed at unconditional love.

  “Hay clay!” Paloma smiled and tried to revive the chant, but Cassidy remained quiet.

  Months later Ken was still making daily trips to Home Hardware, returning only with notes. In Buckhannon, flags still flew from every corner, but they’d grown faded and forgotten, part of the background. The town felt frozen, stagnant.

  “How much research are you going to do?” Paloma asked one evening as Cassidy dozed beside them. Ken looked up from his book on Russian izba and the plans spread before him on the threadbare lilac sheets.

  “As much as I need to. I was thinking of an outdoor sauna.”

  Paloma sighed. They would be in the farmhouse forever. Beneath her, something scurried in the root cellar, small claws scrambling over the dirt floor.

  She tried to adjust her mood—closed her eyes, leaned back, and let herself imagine it—a log cabin, hay-clay insulation, and a sauna outside.

  The next day, when he returned from work slightly later than usual, Ken did not slump into a chair with a book and plans. Instead he stood in the doorway and called out, “Who wants to help me unload?”

  “Me!” Cassidy jumped up. “Unload what?”

  Paloma followed them out. There, in the rusty bed of the old Ford they’d purchased after the Bonneville finally gave up the ghost, were several dozen boxes of nails.

  Paloma looked at Ken, who grinned. Somewhere close by, a whip-poor-will sang.

  “We’ll have to dig for the foundation first, have someone come out to do the concrete. But I wanted to get something to mark the occasion.” Ken lifted Cassidy to the truck’s bumper, and she reached into the bed. As she lifted a box of nails, its contents spilled out of the flimsy flip-top box to the muddy driveway. The cascade of metal sounded like rain and she shrieked. “Don’t worry, sweet pea,” Ken said. “We’re going to be spilling lots of nails.”

  They cleaned up the mess, and all three carried the nails to the shed, Paloma holding her stack close to her body. Their weight against her cotton shirt held a palpable promise. Once the truck bed was empty, Ken took two rusty shovels from their place against the wall and handed the smaller one to Cassidy.

  “Ready?” he asked, and she nodded eagerly.

  Ceremonially, they carried their shovels to a spot slightly up the hill, and together, moved a few shovelfuls of earth as Paloma cheered. After, the three went back to the house and feasted, the air around them light and jolly. The next day, Ken began in earnest, clearing the land and digging. Two weeks later two men and a truck came out and laid the concrete foundation. A month after that, Ken hammered the last nail on the rough framing.

  Paloma tried to help, doing her best to follow Ken’s instructions, but it seemed she could do nothing right.

  “Goddamn it, Paloma. I need you to hold it!” Ken shouted. Her arms burned. “No, hold it.” Paloma let the piece of drywall fall to the floor with a heavy thud and a puff of white dust that reminded her of coal smoke.

  “Mommy?” Cassidy asked from the doorway.

  “What?” Paloma snapped, feeling instant regret.

  “Nothing.” Cassidy slunk back out.

  “I’m done, Ken,” Paloma said. “You can build the damn house yourself.”

  So he did. Paloma invested more time in the farm—turning the goats’ milk into cheese, yogurt, and small soaps, expanding the garden until it covered a quarter acre and provided a good portion of their family’s food. Cassidy sat at Ken’s feet and practiced hammering nails into wood scraps, excited at the responsibility of holding a heavy tool.

  The house took shape, Ken’s blueprints came to life, and despite his minimal experience in construction, Paloma had to admit the home was gorgeous. Ken became totally consumed by work and building and, with Paloma removed from both of these worlds, even raising Cassidy began to feel like less of a shared project. She was growing more independent, and her time with each of them required less consultation between parents.

  Paloma felt herself grow anxious as the house began to transform from a sketch into a solid structure. It was Ken’s dream she’d needed—the possibility. As the house took shape, she felt herself retreat from the real, permanent life here that it signified. The walls of the house went up with ones in her heart to match.

  They painted Cassidy’s room in the bright shades of neon orange and green that she chose and their own in a light bluebell. Paloma, in turn, grew moody and bitter, Ken, callous and insensitive.

  On the first night they slept in the new house, Paloma, Ken, and Cassidy sat together in the living room, which smelled of semigloss and sawdust, and watched The Simpsons. Cassidy fell asleep between them and Ken gently removed her head from his lap and walked up the stairs, past the octagonal window. Paloma followed him to their new master bedroom, which felt huge; there was space for a rug beside the queen-sized bed, and the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the vast dark stretches of trees beyond. This sense of openness felt to Paloma less like freedom than like loneliness.

  Their lovemaking, too, was lonely. Neither looked at each other, but kept turning their heads to take in their new surroundings. They were like wild animals, though their wildness had nothing to do
with passion. They were like small rodents caught out in the open, anticipating threats in every direction. Paloma reached for the charm around her neck—the one Ken had given her in Prague, and found only a chain. When had it fallen off? She gripped the sheets instead, clinging to the real, reassuring linen.

  When Ken had finished, he’d rolled over and fallen asleep. Paloma had stood, gone to the window, and strained to look skyward. The roof’s eaves jutted out, preventing her from seeing the stars.

  Now, alone in the room they’d shared, Paloma went to the window again and looked out at the sunlight sparkling on the pond, transfixed for a moment by beauty and nostalgia. She would not be fooled, though, by tricks of light and her sentimental mind. She was ready to leave this house.

  Cassidy

  “Cassidy?” Paloma called from upstairs.

  Cassidy looked up from her grandmother’s sewing machine, which she’d set up on the kitchen table. A dozen or so YouTube videos had helped her figure out how to thread the thing and several more had guided her as she sewed a crib sheet. “Yeah?” she called back. Cassidy studied the slightly crooked hem. It wasn’t perfect, but she’d done it.

  “Can you come here?” Paloma’s voice had been softer around the edges lately, even when she was shouting from another room.

  “Sure. Let me put this away.”

  Paloma’s scent hit Cassidy like a wave as she entered her mother’s large walk-in closet. It was concentrated here, the air saturated with lavender. Being in the master bedroom was strange. It had always been a grown-up sanctuary with an invisible line drawn in the doorway that Cassidy had crossed only for a reason—to ask for a snack or to tell her parents she was going outside—and left right after. Even as a little kid, startled by a nightmare, she ran in and clawed her way up the double-stacked futon to nestle between her parents’ warm sleeping bodies, but there was an unspoken understanding that she would return to her own room before the sun came up.