After I turned out the lights, Meridian continued to draw her eighty-eight watts. By morning, the panels upon her roof would begin replacing them.

This was an arrangement I understood.

I was less certain how to replace the time being consumed elsewhere.

The court had placed a date upon the calendar. The house had placed another, less formal one upon every object still inside it. A refrigerator and a heater remained to be installed in Meridian, along with the considerable quantity of ordinary life which does not become lighter merely because one has decided to carry less of it. Yang’s requirements were modest, but they were not negotiable. Mine had a way of becoming apparent only when I attempted to do without them.

Don came when he came.

As the days passed, this became a less useful basis upon which to arrange the work. His generosity had been real. So had the lights he had helped put beneath my hand. Neither fact could persuade the refrigerator wiring to install itself on an afternoon when he was expected and did not appear. I could be grateful for what he had done and still find that I could no longer entrust the remaining days to the possibility of his arrival.

Meanwhile, in an act of timing which I would have rejected as contrived had it appeared in a novel, work arrived.

It was promising work. The sort which called upon abilities I still possessed in extravagant quantities, even while my back and the rest of my body conducted their objections to almost everything else. A company had a serious problem. I could help solve it. Its principal, having engaged me at a moment when the problem required close attention, was preparing to depart for Mount Everest.

I do not suggest that a man must remain within sight of his office whenever something has gone wrong there. I have spent too much of my own life working from improbable places to make such a rule. Nevertheless, Everest seemed a particularly emphatic demonstration that my presence would be required.

The company arranged an apartment so that I could stay and work.

When I arrived, it was unfurnished.

There are degrees of unfurnished which may be tolerable to a woman accustomed to constructing her own home inside a cargo trailer. An apartment without a bed falls below even that generous standard. I was obliged to pursue the matter with some persistence before one appeared. The result was shelter and a place to sleep, for which I was grateful in much the same way one is grateful when a door, after several attempts, finally opens.

I had a bed in Meridian already. I had made it myself, at considerable cost to my spine. It was framed in velvet, supplied by batteries and sunlight, and belonged to a home I had built because I could no longer depend upon keeping the one outside it.

Now I was to place that home in storage and sleep in a bed I had needed to request repeatedly from a company which required me nearby.

The irony did not improve with inspection.

For months I had treated money as the missing quantity in every calculation. With enough of it, I could pay for help, finish Meridian, settle the immediate bills, and leave on a day chosen for its convenience rather than its proximity to a court order. The contract appeared to supply at least part of that missing quantity.

Yet as soon as it did, I discovered what I had actually been trying to purchase.

Optionality.

I wanted to be able to hitch Meridian to the truck and go. I wanted the choice to remain mine, even if I chose to stay another day. Money was useful because it kept that choice alive. A contract which paid me while fixing me in place presented a more complicated bargain.

I accepted it. The work mattered, and so did the income. I had obligations which would not be improved by pretending either was beneath me. But acceptance placed another date upon the calendar. Even if the trailer were ready to move tomorrow, I was bound here until the end of the month.

Golden irons are still irons. Their advantage is that one may use the gold to buy bolt cutters later.

Before then came court.

Its dates did not yield to the company’s crisis, nor to the number of boxes still in the house. The proceeding advanced with the steady courtesy of a machine which will wait for the appointed hour and not a minute longer. I still had papers to examine, decisions to make, and the practical business of surrendering a house while attempting to remain employed and capable of departure afterward.

Every hour devoted to the contract was an hour in which I could not sort what remained inside the house. Every hour devoted to the house was an hour in which the company’s problem remained waiting for me. When I returned to Meridian, I found that neither obligation had caused her unfinished systems to complete themselves out of sympathy.

I began to worry less about the objects I wished to keep than about the ones I could not afford to leave. There is a distinction. Much of a former life may be mourned and abandoned. A piece of equipment necessary to work, keep warm, repair the trailer, or care for Yang is harder to replace with philosophy. If I failed to get those things aboard before the house was gone, they would remain behind even though there was space for them somewhere in Meridian. Space does very little good without the time and strength to use it.

I had spent months believing that escape required solving every remaining problem.

There would be no such afternoon. Don might come, or he might not. The court would proceed. The company would need me. The apartment would contain a bed and little else. Meridian would remain unfinished, and I would still have to decide what crossed her threshold.

Some problems would stay unsolved behind me.

This realization was considerably less peaceful than it may sound. I have made a career of bringing disorder under control, often for people who had paid well to be told that it could be done. To leave matters unresolved offended both my training and my vanity. I could produce a long and persuasive list of things which ought to be finished before departure.

California could produce a longer one. It had gravity.

California also sucked.

Meridian had eight solar panels and a hitch, and a twin-turbine-assisted truck to pull her. She was able to make a bed comfortable, turn on the lights, keep drinks cold and power a television for entertainment through the night while the roof awaited sunrise. These were small powers measured against a court, a contract, a house full of possessions, and a lifetime’s habit of finishing what I had begun.

They were nevertheless powers of her own.

For the present, I would do the work I had agreed to do. I would appear where the court required me. I would get the necessary things into the trailer by whatever means remained available, and accept that some necessary things might be missed. I could not yet turn the key and depart. The end of the month stood between me and the road.

But I no longer intended to make departure contingent upon the satisfaction of every creditor, every institution, every unfinished task, and every part of myself which insisted that a competent woman ought to have managed this more elegantly.

The final engine burn to escape the gravity well of suckage that is California would not be completion.

It would be refusal.