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that one of the adults in her world will carry her steadily on to the next milepost.
    But Claire needs to move around, the best diversion she’s found so far. She hunts in the closets until she finds a small electric fan and props it in front of the woodstove to draw the meager heat deeper into the room. Corrugated boxes are stacked on the peeling kitchen counters, shoved up against the walls and piled at the bottom of the stairs waiting to be carried up, and these are only a fraction of what was packed onto the moving van. Most are labeled with a room that doesn’t exist here: Mom’s study, walk-in closet, library, guest powder room, butler’s pantry, media room.
    This house has no such discretionary rooms. It is a single tall box divided into four spaces, two bedrooms sharing a bathroom upstairs, and one large living room and a small kitchen down. There is another box, too, a utility alcove and tiny toilet stall shunted underneath a low shed roof adjacent to the kitchen—probably added in the forties when the house was finally electrified. Last spring break Claire let Jory and her friends paint all the kitchen cabinet doors in enameled reds and blues and yellows—the only vibrant colors in the house.
    There is a large porch running along the front, with the broken remains of decorative wooden corner pieces at the joints between post and beam, resembling quartered wagon wheels. Four wide plank steps drop down to the land, which spreads in liquid undulations across eighty acres until it dives five or six hundred feet to the valley floor. Back when this county was first developed, first taken from the Indians, people probably considered the entire ranch their dwelling, at least seasonally. Back when the interior of a house afforded little more than protection from wind and rain.
    There is a barn, too—the kind people stop to take photographs of on leisurely Sunday drives with no destination in mind. It is useless, really, but for nostalgia—it lists so much Claire has warned Jory not to play inside it alone for fear that it might collapse in the least wind. And beyond the aspen groves there is even a shallow stream that empties into a dredged cattle pond clean enough for swimming in the summer, when the earth blisters and the grass is so dry it sounds like the rustle of snake skins.
    They had looked for property in the Okanogan area for more than two years, driven over a thousand square miles east of the Cascades. Addison seemed to have some particular vision in mind, a cutout that necessitated an exact fit, a missing piece for his entree into the privileged world. He wanted something bold, the seed for a family dynasty. Claire teased that he’d watched too many episodes of Dallas as a kid. But at least once a month they drove over the mountain passes to wind through the valleys and along the rivers that fed the Columbia.
    Addison had finally found this place on a solo trip, a weekend Claire and Jory had stayed in Seattle for a ballet rehearsal. Claire knew the minute she answered his phone call that they would own it—Addison was ready to write the check, a cash-out deal. Claire didn’t even see it until after she’d signed the papers, a fact she now takes as a bitter example of how freely, even gladly, she had given up asking where their money went. The supply had seemed endless.
    The house had been built at least ninety years ago, directly over a burned-down homestead cabin, one of the first in the region. In its time it must have been quite the showcase, with indoor plumbing anda second story, sunk into a broad sweep of Idaho fescue; the original vegetable garden had long ago wasted to a scar of Barnaby and mustard tumbleweed that delineated the plowed rectangle as clearly as any deer fence. This land was so different from the rainy west side of the Cascades; with barely enough water to scrape by, the native bunch grasses reliably succumbed to opportunistic weeds anyplace the soil was disturbed. An apple orchard