Her name was Melody and she was his boss’s wife’s niece. He could tell by the look on her face when she opened the door that she had been prepped for the sight of him. Dirk was not the blind date you wanted to see through the peephole of your apartment door. He was, at that time in his life, over three hundred pounds, covered in freckles, and going bald in a weird way. But Dirk was a banker—a big banker—and it didn’t take much imagination to piece together the conversations that went on between the married women who fixed him up and the single women who agreed to go out with him. They knew what big banker meant. It meant managing director. It meant hedge fund. It meant all the things in life that these kinds of women wanted, and if Dirk was three hundred–plus pounds of lumpy, pale freckled flesh, at least he wasn’t seventy. At least he didn’t have ex-wives and grown children, a bum prostate and a nine o’clock bedtime. And the right woman could put him on a diet and encourage him to shave his head.
Melody was taking a long time to get ready. Dirk swiped right on twenty pieces of Tinder Trash for later in the evening and then slipped his phone in his pocket. He stood up and went over to the bookshelf and examined the titles. A mix of college paperbacks, cookbooks written by television personalities, and hardcover bestsellers. He’d seen worse. He turned back to the couch and that’s when he saw it.
A dog.
A tiny one. White as a snowball.
Motionless, with its neck at a weird angle.
Oh, shit.
Dirk poked it with his index finger.
Still warm.
But dead. Dead in that way dead things are—clearly, undeniably dead.
Dirk panicked. He’d killed the dog. He’d thought it was, well, not a pillow, but maybe a part of a pillow; there were a lot of freaking pillows on that couch, and some fluffy ones, fluffy with scraggly Mongolian fur, and anyone could have made a mistake like this, and it wasn’t his fault, he was a big guy, and weren’t little dogs supposed to yap when strangers came by, maybe the dog was dead before he got there—Unlikely, Dirk, unlikely!—and Melody was his boss’s wife’s niece! And Dirk had just sat on her dog!
Almost without thinking, Dirk picked up the dog and slipped it into the silver umbrella stand by the front door, then quietly let himself out.
He hailed a cab and headed straight to JFK. He looked at the departures board, starting with the As, and settled on Aruba. It wasn’t until he reached the ticket counter that he realized he didn’t have his passport. His passport, along with everything else he owned, was inside his loft in Tribeca. He knew if he went home to get it, he’d stay there.
He went back to the departures board.
Bozeman. Bozeman sounded good.
He was done with New York City, done with dating women who had small dogs and umbrella stands. He’d been that guy, the fat banker whose expensive tie slithered over his belly all day because it couldn’t find a good resting spot. The guy who looked fifty at thirty and would probably die of heart failure before his sixtieth birthday. He’d never quit his job, not officially; he just disappeared. He knew that accidentally killing a teacup poodle was not a fireable offense, not when he brought in over four million dollars a year for the firm, but what the whole thing had given him was clarity. Clarity was a commodity that had been in short supply for Dirk for pretty much all of his life, and when it came, it came big.
He stumbled upon a worn copy of Helen and Scott Nearing’s old homesteading bible The Good Life at a used bookstore and fell in love with it. There were newer books, of course, and the Internet—people all over the Internet were talking about this stuff, permaculture and tiny houses, leaving the rat race and living the simple life—but it was the Nearings’ book he kept on his nightstand at whatever motel he happened to be staying at, it was the Nearings’ book he read cover to cover.
After playing pool with a guy in a bar in Butte who’d been living inside a refurbished school bus for three years, Dirk began to develop his plan. He liked the idea of starting with a school bus. Dirk could afford to do things differently—he had money in the bank, he could buy himself whatever he needed, really, within reason—but he was, fundamentally, a man who liked a challenge. So he bought an old bus at an auction for six thousand dollars, listed the seats on Craigslist, and sold them to the owner of a drive-in movie theater for the labor it took to pull them out. Then he hit the road.
His plan was to head to Maine and try to replicate the Nearings’ homesteading experiment as closely as possible. He’d live in the bus, teach himself to farm, eventually build himself a little cabin off the grid. He wanted to do as much with his hands as possible, with his hands and with his brains, mostly to see if it could still be done.
He was driving through the Hudson Valley when his bus broke down for the third time. He happened to pick up the local paper and noticed a small ad in the back.
Beekeeper Wanted. No experience necessary.
*
Kelly stalked back to the house from the pool in a pissy mood.
It was like she was in prison! Even that idiot beekeeper wouldn’t lay a finger on her. And she’d all but offered herself up to him. And not even “all but.” It was like…it was like she was Gordon Allen’s property, and no one would dare to get near her. Certainly nobody on his payroll, and everyone Kelly encountered was on Gordon’s payroll in one way or another.
A week earlier, Kelly had looked up Renaldo. Good old Renaldo. It had been over six years, and he had never been an e-mail type of guy, but she finally tracked him down through a bartender/coke addict she was friends with on Facebook. Renaldo was still living in the Keys, still unmarried, still casually dealing drugs and napping in hammocks, living the life of a man who’d figured the whole thing out. But for some reason, he seemed less than interested in flying in to visit her, living it up in a five-star hotel in Manhattan for a week or so, all paid for by her.
When she pressed him, he admitted he was involved with someone. He said, in that formal way of his, the way of a lothario for whom English is a second language, “The truth is, Kelly, I have met someone.”
“I don’t mind, Renaldo. You know that.”
“Yes, but I must tell you, Kelly, I am in love.”
“You’re in love?”
“She is my perfect woman. I wish you could meet—”
Kelly hung up the phone.
*
It was well past two o’clock in the morning when Owen’s cell phone started vibrating on top of his nightstand. Lucy finally jabbed him in the kidney with a pointy knee, waking him from a dead sleep.
“Hello,” he mumbled into the phone.
“I’m sorry for calling so late.”
It was Izzy.
“You can’t do this,” Owen whispered. “You can’t call me like this.”
“I know,” said Izzy. “I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone. I just need you to come here right now. You know I wouldn’t call you like this if it wasn’t important.”
“It’s the middle of the goddamn night.”
“This is really serious. Just come, please.”
Owen hung up the phone. Lucy had rolled over and watched the back of his head throughout the entire conversation.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He got up and pulled on yesterday’s jeans, which he’d left in a heap on the floor by the bed. “I’ve got to, uh. It’s um, it’s sort of an emergency.”
Owen had the look on his face that he had a lot these days, half apology and half nonapology. Half this-is-what-we-get. Half this-is-what-we-agreed-upon. Half you-had-to-know-things-like-this-could-happen, things like your husband being called away in the middle of the night to deal with something, and someone, you know nothing about. “I can’t say much more about it.”
“Go,” said Lucy. “Just go.”