Marco has another kitchen.

This is possibly overstating it. The second kitchen is largely a slab of concrete, covered over with fitted slate tile. There is a well head here, made of old brass. It is pumped by hand, and pours water out onto floor in gasping spurts if there is no bucket there to catch it. The floor is wet. There is only one wall, one low wall of brick and topped with tarred wood. There are holes in the floor, filled with dead leaves. Marco says he has poles and a wine red canopy to give the kitchen shade in summer, but he cannot find them. The plants have grown wild and thick out here, on the other end of the garden. There is little need for poles or canvas.

I am sitting in the reclining chair of slatted wood turned grey by the battery of the seasons. The only other furniture is a table, even greyer than the chair, knocked out of true by time and use. It looks as if it barely be able to support itself. Juliet is thin enough that for her to sit on the table would look only mildly dangerous. Juliet is sitting on the table. She is swinging her feet beneath her in careless, deliberate arcs, and the table creaks and sways with the movement.

Juliet asks me, "do you think Marco built this himself?" Her feet make work of the air beneath her, and she has turned out against the table. I stare at the slate below by feet. I do not know too much about stone or building. I imagine how much work it would be, to mix and haul enough concrete to make the bottom part of this place. I am briefly gripped with the image of the two of us, sitting on a thin square of stone bridging some secret and terrible pit of ragged walls that reaches deep into the earth. It passes.

I imagine bringing up the slates, two at a time and heavy, piling them perhaps there or there before putting them down in mortar. I have a little experience with brick walls: the wall would have been hard work, but simple work. I think one man could be capable of it if the concrete came from a truck. I can certainly imagine Macro out here, younger, hair back under a kerchief, building because he wanted to.

"Perhaps," I tell her.

Juliet nods at me, oddly in time with her feet. Her skin is darkening, now, even as her hair is turning lighter under the days of unstemmed sun. She does not look at me, but keeps her eyes on the thicket of wilds beside us, on the opposite side of the kitchen from the garden, where things grow dark and strange.

"I've been here longer than you," she says. She is looking at me now. There is little challenge in her voice, and I wonder now how many days she has been staying at the house. "In the winter, I've watched him come out here and bank coals against this wall." There is a spot down the wall that is blackened, and she points to it without her eyes leaving mine. "He roasts things over them." She gestures towards the floor by my feet. "He sits here, out of the wind, under a blanket."

Around us it is hot, and growing hotter. The air is thickening into a summer afternoon. I try to imagine the private comfort of the blanket on the cold wind, pulled together at the chest, but the sun shines on around me and I cannot. The green around us is pure and deep under the tempered blue sky and the light, golden and strong. For the moment, Winter has been made impossible in this place.