There is a slight movement within the automobile. I approach and peer through the window glass to see a young woman sleeping upon her back in the front seat. She is dressed in short pants and a shirt without sleeves. Her arm rests over her eyes. I look in the rear window, but she is alone. Once again I shake my head at how these American women live. I look once more at her naked legs and feet, then I return to my yard with my tea.

THE SKY IS DARK AND NICKY IS ON A BROWN HORSE STANDING IN Astream. I’m there too, knee-deep in water. He sits in the saddle, looking down at me the way he did the morning he left, like it’s too late to do anything and he’s made up his mind to leave right away before he gets too sad about it all and won’t be able to move. Except his horse won’t move. It keeps looking at me with its big eyes. Every time Nick jerks on the reins the horse opens its mouth and lets out a high-pitched whir. And when Nick kicks its ribs with his heels it sounds like a rock hitting a hollow tree. I put my hand on the horse’s damp neck and look up at Nick, then everything changes and he and I are sitting on a couch somewhere, both smoking, me pleading about wanting a baby, Nick sitting so still and quiet, looking straight ahead like I’ve just asked him to drink cyanide. I can hear the horse outside, the whirring and knocking. But who’s the rider?

Who is the rider?

I opened my eyes and sat up in the front seat of the Bonneville. I could taste last night’s cigarettes and I turned the ignition key halfway to light up the digital clock. It wasn’t quite eight in the morning but already the sun was coming warm through the windshield and on the maroon upholstery and me. The woods were thick and shaded as always, and deep inside were spots of sunlight. Then I heard the sound that had been in my sleep, and I turned and looked across the street at the house. Two carpenters were up on the roof above my kitchen.

They were both shirtless and one of them was ripping away shingles with the claw of his hammer while the other was using his power saw to cut through my roof, my father’s roof, Frankie’s roof. Their pickup truck was parked in front of the house close to the driveway where last night I saw a new white Buick in the shine of my headlights as I drove up the hill, but now it was gone, and I should’ve listened to Lester Burdon and stayed away from here. But it was the only place I could think to go so late at night after driving around for over an hour, talking myself out of checking into another motel somewhere. Now the two carpenters stood together and used crowbars to pry a huge square of my roof off. They let it fall to the ground, then they stood on the floor of my attic between the rafters. The one with the saw started cutting right into one of them and I scooted behind the wheel and jerked open the door and ran across the street barefoot. I yelled up at them, but they couldn’t hear me over the saw, so I stepped around my roof and climbed up the ladder. They were both tan and one of them had a tattoo of a diner on his shoulder. The other one stopped cutting and looked from me to the one with the tattoo, then back at me again.

“What are you doing?”

The one with the tattoo dropped his hammer into his tool belt. “Excuse me?”

“Who said you could do this? This is my fucking house!”

He peered over the roof down at his truck and my car. “And you are?”

“I own this house. Me. Get off my roof.”

“Are you Mrs. Behrani?”

“No.”

The other carpenter reached into his apron, shook a cigarette from its pack, and lit it. I could feel him looking at my bare arms and legs, and at my hair all ratty from sleep. It was cold last night and now my head felt stopped up and I felt so out of place and wrong.

“Mr. Behrani hired me. You’ll have to talk to him.”

I looked from the tattooed carpenter to the one smoking his cigarette. He glanced away from me and took in the view and I turned and saw the rooftops of Corona below, then the green-gray ocean stretching out from the beach to the horizon. Somehow this made me madder and I climbed back down the ladder and began stepping over the shingles and one of the carpenters yelled to watch out for nails just as I stepped on the upside-down plywood where dozens of nail points were sticking out and now four or five of them were sinking into the heel and ball of my foot. I screamed, jerking my knee up, the blood dripping. “Shit.” I hopped and sat down, then twisted my foot up, but there was so much blood I couldn’t see where the holes were. “Fuck.”

“Here.” The tattooed carpenter squatted in front of me and tied a bandanna tight around my ankle. He helped me stand and guided me to the front steps, my front steps, and he knocked on the screen door. I had my hand on his bare shoulder, my elbow against his back. His skin was warm and damp and I could feel the muscle under it. I was thinking how I hadn’t brushed my teeth or washed my face, that I’d slept in my car last night and now was bleeding on my own doorstep waiting for a stranger to answer.

A black-haired boy came to the door. He was maybe fifteen and he wore bright orange surfer shorts and a loose T-shirt. He glanced down at my foot I wasn’t letting touch the ground. A woman came up behind him. She had short thick hair and dark eyes with hardly any makeup. She was wearing a designer sweat suit, and there was a big ring on her left hand. I wanted to say that she was in my goddamn house, that she had no fucking right to remodel it, but the carpenter spoke up first and asked her if we could use the bathroom to wash my foot, and if she had something we could use to keep the blood from getting on her rug. And it was her rug. I could see it on the wall-to-wall carpeting behind her, a huge deep red and brown Persian rug. The woman told the boy something in what sounded Arabic or Israeli, and the boy went to the kitchen and came back with a plastic trash bag he handed to the carpenter, who bent down and pulled it loosely over my foot. I felt like throwing up, my stomach contracting. The woman was looking at my hair and face, my wrinkled shirt, and her eyes seemed so full of caring I took a weak breath and didn’t say anything as she stepped back and let the carpenter and me inside.

I had one arm on the carpenter’s shoulder, the other holding the plastic trash bag onto my foot. We passed a silver coffee table with bowls of nuts and wrapped chocolates set on top of it. There was a plush sofa and expensive-looking lamps. The carpenter stopped at the kitchen and asked the woman where the bathroom was, but before she could talk I told him to go all the way down the hall. I leaned on his shoulder and hopped through a house that didn’t seem like mine anymore; the door to my bedroom was open and I caught a glimpse of a queen-size bed with brass posts. On the floor near the windows were huge potted green plants, and on the carpet around the bed were small rugs, deep purple, green, and black.

In the bathroom I sat on the edge of the tub and let cold water run over the sole of my foot as I watched the blood swirl down the drain. The carpenter stood beside me with his hands on his hips. He still had his tool belt on and his hammer handle was swaying against his leg.

“When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

“Ees she yet bleeding?”

The woman reached by me, her arm brushing my face, and I smelled lavender and cotton. She knelt on the floor, adjusted the water temperature, then took a bar of soap and washed my foot under hot water. She called to her son in their language, then she sat on the edge of the tub, gently took my foot and swung it to rest in a towel in her lap. It was a white towel, thick and soft, like only five-star hotels use, and I started to pull my bleeding foot from it.