So then she had them all, and in the tale she reached the time when she arrived back in the Faraways and the town of Cascadia, which seemed to awake from sleep as she went through it, confused and unready for her, building after building and road after road, till she stopped her last car in the driveway in front of her father's house in Labrador, thinking that she remembered the house as oriented the other way on its lot, as though it had been flopped somehow meantime, like a photograph, but her feet seemed to be unconfused and to know it was okay, and she was already used to it this way by the time she reached the unlocked door, pushed it open, and called to her father.

Pierce had told her how people once thought of the world as made of Ys, that you are constantly choosing one or another branch, the obvious and easy one or the less clear and harder one, but Roo thought it was really the reverse or upside down of that (as she had lived it, anyway): the ways didn't part from one another but led to one another, like the thousand little streams coming down Mount Randa: each one joining another, which joins another till they reach a stream, or a Y's stem, wide enough to contain them all, which will be the only way the drop of yourself can go or could have gone. When she came home to the Faraways she learned (almost the first day she was back) that Beau was there too, had come to live in the county, the town up the road from the town where she was born. But near as he was, glad as she was, amazed as she was at whatever it was in the world or the heavens that had contrived to bring him so close (the same forces that had brought her back the way she had come to find him there), he was as far from her as ever; farther, because she wouldn't endure those people who gathered around him and depended on him. She said cruel things to them, told them the truths they ought to have known and didn't, and Beau sent her away, or didn't welcome her there, which was the same thing. And in the last winter, at the drought's end, as though the plotted curves of the two of them rising and falling in opposite directions had only happened to cross as they, or the worlds that bore them, moved apart ineluctably, he was gone again. She wouldn't join with those others who wanted her to mourn with them, wouldn't share her grief. She kept hers for herself. Beau had taught her—she knew it before he said it, but that didn't mean she hadn't learned it from him—that if you divided love it wasn't like dividing money, or food, which came out less for each portion you made. It didn't; the act of dividing it did not cause it to lessen, actually it grew, it doubled with every division and everyone got more. She knew it, and she knew that Beau not only knew it but could do it, which not many people could, not she certainly: she wondered if the original allotment she had been given was so small that it could never be divided, and so grow larger. A little hard uncracked nut inside her: that's what she felt as she came and went to and from Barney's house, and learned to sell cars, which was what was left for her to do, and one day in spring came home to catch the phone ringing: somebody needing a car.

4

The foundation's abundance was gone, and Pierce had to look for a job, and quick.

"Well, you're not good for much,” Roo said. “Can't tend bar or wait tables. You'd be sunk."

He wouldn't nod agreement, but couldn't deny it. “Teaching,” he said. “Substitute teaching."

"You sign up,” she said. “Then you wait for a day here, a day there. You'd be a newbie, the last person they'd call. And school's over in a couple of weeks."

He had bought the newspapers, sat with her at the Donut Hole and went through the ads. She watched him with interest, chair tipped back. She wore the coat of all colors.

"They're hiring at Novelty Plastics,” she said. “I hear. Down in Cascadia."

"Sure,” he said.

"Well?"

He looked up to see that she was really asking.

"I can't, really,” he said. “I mean it's not exactly what I."

"It's what people do,” she said. “Work."

He shook out the inky sheets. How easily, not even aware, he had bypassed so many common hells. He had not even had to get up to go to work in the morning for over a year. And before that he was a college teacher, not really employment in any arduous sense, it was simply the extension of student days by other means: the same long vacations, the same short hours. Now he stood at a brink for sure, though, no way to go forward or sideways, down or up.

Here was their ad, in fact, his eye just then fell on it. Novelty Plastics. Hiring all departments.

"Is it,” he asked, “hard?"

She regarded him with a weird compassion. “It's a job,” she said. “It's not hard to do. If it was hard the people who do it wouldn't be doing it. You have to do it a lot, though. You know. All day. Or night."

He shook the paper. “So how much does it pay?"

"I guess minimum and up. It's an open shop, as far as I know."

He wasn't sure what an open shop was. It sounded like it ought to be good, but he had the impression that maybe it wasn't. “It would only be for a while,” he said. “I have to get a CV together. Send it out."

"Sure,” she said. “A couple of months."

His soul shrank. Not so long surely. A couple of months.

"That's if you get hired,” she said.

"What,” he said. “There's a lengthy application process?"

"No. But they don't like to hire your type."

"My type."

"Oh, you know. Fuzzy-faced wiseacres. Educated gents. They think you won't stay. That you're only there out of desperation, and something else will turn up for you.” She crossed her arms. “They see that."

How did she know these things? He thought she was vamping, but he had no way to tell. “Fuzzy-faced intellectuals,” he said. “Narrow-chested cack-handed..."

"What handed?"

"Soft-handed yellow-bellied..."

"You definitely need to lose the face hair,” she said. “And get a haircut."

"Weak-kneed,” he said. “Wet-eyed. Double-domed."

"You want a haircut?” she asked. “I'm pretty good."

He looked at her without speaking for so long that at last she goggled at him, hey? Well? But he was thinking of a haircut he had himself given, once up along the Shadow River, and a pair of gilt-handled long-beaked scissors, and the sound they made, snip snip.

"Tell me something,” he said. “Why do you keep on being so nice to me?"

"You're not worth it?"

"I'm not sure I am. And anyway."

"Are you asking what I'm expecting back?"

"No.” He tried to appear offended. “I didn't mean that."

"Just doing my job,” she said softly.

She chose clothes for him too, that wouldn't give him away, a hooded sweatshirt that was the oldest piece of clothing he owned, cheap new sneakers he had bought once thinking he might take up running for his health, a billed cap she brought him that said NABCO on it—she snorted when he asked what that meant.

Thus dressed and lamb-shorn, he went with her in a car of hers, a long livid Cougar this time, to American Novelty Plastics, which was one of the few enterprises still housed in an old factory complex, almost a small brick city, that crested the foaming yellow falls of the Blackbury River at Cascadia. He'd never been so far inside such a place before. The parking lot was crowded with cars as similar and as varied as the workers within must be. They drove in and out of the corridors of brick looking for the personnel office.

"There,” she said.