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He wore dark blue denim jeans and a light blue denim shirt and made
no apologies for the outfit to anyone. Thick gold rings hugged tightly
around his sausage fingers, his left ring finger unadorned. His accent was
thick and foreign, definitely bred south of the Mason-Dixon. He gave
us the lowdown on the whole process of picking out a "specimen of fine
pine;' then let us have the freedom of the yard for as long as we wanted.
Aggie shot ten paces ahead of me the moment he released us from his
sales pitch. I wanted to call out, ask her to wait up but I knew she prob-
ably wouldn't have heard me. Or rather, she would have pretended not
to have heard me. She was always pretending those days.

We hadn't been browsing for five minutes before the darken-
ing sky opened up. Fat rain drops began to plop in a strange syncopated
rhythm, the tempo consistently speeding up until we were caught in a
full-on deluge. I squinted my eyes to make out Agnes' shape through the
sheet of rain. She was still walking forward, walking away from me and
any hope of dry refuge.

It was then that I realized I shouldn't have been standing. I
should have been running. I should have been chasing after Aggie rather
than let her lead blindly. Even in my heavy boots, I picked up one foot,
.then the next, and took offlike a wannabe Marion Jones. I had let my
best friend get so far ahead of me, in this farm, in her life, in her head.
I had grown fond of taking the path ofleast resistance, of calling out to
her instead of holding her hand and guiding. I had left pamphlets on
treatment centers in strategically placed fans on the kitchen table and
numbers scrawled on the bathroom mirror in lipstick, a small heart
drawn underneath as a half-assed attempt to convey some sort of love
through this passive-aggressive approach. Unfortunately, a stranger
won't know how to navigate a city's map without a native showing her
the ropes; she'll go in the wrong direction down a one-way street for
miles before realizing she's shit out ofluck.

Aggie had stopped by a squat Douglas fir tree, helping me
catch up to her in seconds. It was more of a bush than a tree, really,
standing only about four feet tall. I didn't understand why Aggie had
paused to look at it until I heard her gasping, crying. The rain disguised
tears, but it was those little sharp intakes of country fresh air that proved
her guilty.

"I like this one;' she said, her words coming out disjointed

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