Days

The days at camp had a shape and she kept to it, because the shape was the thing that stood between them and the other way of living, which was to lie down in the quiet and let it have you. Papa had taught her that. A day is a wall you build in the morning, he said, and you lay it up brick by brick and you don't look at the whole of it or it'll bury you, you just lay the next brick. She had not understood him when he said it. She understood him now.

She woke before Henry and she went down for the water first, two buckets from the pump, working the handle till her shoulder burned and the water came cold and iron-tasting into the pails. The pump was the kind of thing that would have been a marvel to her in The Before and was only Tuesday now, a hand pump over a shallow well that Papa had put in himself against exactly this, against a day when the taps ran dry, and they had run dry the first summer and never run again. She carried the buckets up and set them by the stove and she did not spill them because spilling was wasting and wasting was a thing they could not do anymore, not water, not food, not daylight, not anything.