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up, or would she think he was saying she needed to pay more attention to the house? Or would she rather he didn’t spend the money? Face it, she made most of the income, and with a month’s work destroyed and her not feeling like painting right now, things were going to be tight, and she had to be concerned about that.
    Would she like it if he brought this thing home to her? He really couldn’t tell. He didn’t even know how she was going to react when he told her what Doris had said, about her being a reincarnated Rembrandt or somebody. Would she laugh and take it as a compliment? Or would she snap, “Sure, right, in order to be anybody I have to be a dead white European male,” was that what she’d say? Maybe he shouldn’t even tell her at all.
    Would she like the door wreath? Women, they kept saying they were equal, but they sure as hell were different . Might as well be from Mars. Twenty years married, yet how often could he really tell what she would think about anything?
    To hell with it. Larque would be okay. Save the money. Hoot put the grapevine wreath back where he had found it, bought himself a Coke and a Kit Kat bar, and ingested them as he walked back to work.

THREE
    U P TILL NOW IT HAD BEEN NO PROBLEM FOR L ARQUE when doppelgangers disappeared—the sooner they did it the better. But usually they just faded away; none had ever run out the door as dramatically as Sky had done. It had not been a proper exit, somehow, and everything about Sky felt different, dangerous, life-changing even aside from the problems of income and career.
    Emergency bells were ringing in Larque’s bones. She had to find Sky.
    The only sensible suggestion so far, she decided, had come from the heavyset housedressed woman with the rolled-down nylons, the one who had wanted to see a photo of the missing person. Larque didn’t have any, or if she did, it was boxed in the attic somewhere and would take her days to find. But she knew who might have one handy.
    Early the next morning, therefore, she went to see her mother.
    This was not a lightweight undertaking. Years before—when she was in her forties—Florence O’Connell had abruptly divorced Larque’s father, sold her fully carpeted three-bedroom home with baseboard electric heat, and moved into a series of eccentric dwellings, each more distanced—Larque felt it as distancing—than the last. Becoming a Scientologist, Florrie had lived in a remodeled Piper Cub hangar set in the middle of a cow pasture, sans cows. Then, transmogrified into a Wiccan, she had moved into the woods, occupying an A-frame complete with Jotul stove. After answering an altar call at a Baptist tent revival, she had bought herself a condo at the foot of a ski slope. That and religion had pretty well blown her stock portfolio. Right now she lived in a beaverboard bungalow set far back a flooded-out dirt road alongside the Cold Bottom River, but Larque didn’t know what her mother’s current metaphysical mind-set might be. Larque had stopped asking her about that sort of thing.
    There was a tree, luckily not a huge tree, down across the rutted road. Larque had to get out of her rattletrap Chevette and drag the trunk to the side in order to get past. No big deal. Just another obstacle.
    The bungalow crouched in shade so moist and deep that moss and dandelions grew on the roof. The door felt sticky with wood sweat. Larque did not bother to knock, but shoved it open and walked in. “Hello,” she called.
    The place was mostly one room inside. Sitting yoga-style in the middle of the floor, her mother looked up at her twinkle-eyed, like a gnome.
    â€œHail to thee, blithe spirit!” the gnome recited. “Bird thou never wert.”
    â€œBlithe I never wert, either.” Larque had long since gotten used to being greeted this way. It was one of the shits of life, meant to be accepted, that her mother had in Catholic school gotten hung