Thursday, 4:05 a.m.
At four o’clock Jo got up off the hall floor and went into the kitchen and turned off the flashlight. She stood with it in her hand until the dark came back into the shapes of things, the stools, the refrigerator, the calendar still on August. Then she laid it on its side on the counter and went out the front door in her socks.
The Subaru was furred with dew. She lifted the hatch slowly, the whole way, so it wouldn’t creak at the top, and raised the cargo floor, and the boots were down in the well where she’d left them, the left one curled against the rim of the spare and the right one folded over it like a sleeping dog. She took them out one at a time. She carried them against her chest around the side of the house to the garage door and let herself in and pulled the string on the bulb.
It was still Rob’s garage. He’d been gone two years and had taken the truck and the good saws, and he’d left the rest: the pegboard with the outlines of tools drawn on it in marker where the tools weren’t anymore, the table saw under a blue tarp, his job box on its casters with the lid up and nothing in it but a tangle of extension cord, his old Red Wings on the shelf by the kitchen door with the laces tucked in. Every time she came through here she meant to put the Red Wings in a bag for Goodwill and every time she didn’t.
She sat down on the step below the kitchen door with the elk boots across her knees.
Under the bulb they were darker than she’d thought, a brown with red in it, like a horse chestnut, and the hide had gone soft and creased across the instep where his feet had bent it ten thousand times. She put her face into the mouth of the left one. Woodsmoke. Some rendered animal fat, older and gamier than bacon. And under it the sour green smell she’d caught at the camper, a crushed-stem smell, like the water in a vase when the flowers have been in it too long. She breathed it until she couldn’t smell it anymore.
She tipped the boot toward the light and looked at the lining.
The ridge her thumb had found yesterday was stitching. It ran across the inside of the shaft above the ankle in rows, one under another, small tight even stitches in a thread darker than the leather, and the stitches made marks. They weren’t letters. They were all corners, ticks and crossings and little hooks, like something cut into bark with a knife. She tilted the boot and counted the rows. Eleven. Ten of them ran nearly the width of the shaft. The eleventh was short, two small clusters of marks with a space between them, down low, where the knob of his ankle would sit.
She ran her thumb along the short line. Somebody had pushed a needle through hide hundreds of times to make this, and pulled each stitch tight, and knotted it inside where he’d never see the knots, only feel them against his ankle every step he took.
She had written VOSS in Sharpie inside the collar of every coat he’d ever owned.
She sat there with the boot open on her knee until the water heater clicked on beside her and made her jump. Then she got up and put both boots in the bottom of Rob’s job box, under the extension cord, and took the blue tarp off the table saw and folded it in quarters and laid it over the top, and shut the lid.
She lay down on the couch at twenty to five with her shoes on, meaning to close her eyes for one minute.
◆
It was light when she opened them. The clock on the cable box said 5:20.
His door was open. The bottom bunk was empty, the Pokémon comforter thrown back, the pillow still dented. She said his name, and then the other name, the one she didn’t know how to say, and nothing answered her. The bathroom was empty. His toothbrush, the green one with the dinosaur on the handle that had stood in the cup by itself for eleven days, was lying on the edge of the sink with its bristles splayed. She’d heard the water run at two, after she tucked him in. She’d thought it was the pipes.
The door from the kitchen to the garage was standing open.
The Red Wings were gone from the shelf. There was a clean rectangle in the dust where they had been. The side door to the yard was open, and the job box was shut, and the tarp lay folded on top of it the way she’d folded it. She thought it was the way she’d folded it. She didn’t lift it.
Pip was asleep in her room on her back with both arms flung up over her head, the way she’d slept since she was a baby. Jo stood in the doorway and looked at her for the length of one breath.
Then she took her keys off the hook and went.
◆
Larch ran eight hundred yards from their driveway to the highway. She knew because it was the first half mile of every run she’d done for six years, out to the stop sign and back as a warm-up, and she’d pushed both kids along it in the jogging stroller, first one and then the other.
He was sitting on the curb at the end of it, under the sign.
It was a brown Forest Service sign on two posts at the corner where Larch met the highway, with white letters and an arrow: TWO SISTERS LAKE 29. He was sitting directly beneath it on the concrete, with his knees up and his forearms on his knees, and he wasn’t looking at the sign or the highway. He was looking at his feet. Rob’s Red Wings stuck out in front of him like clown shoes. He’d wrapped the laces twice around his ankles and tied them in front.
She pulled up alongside and put the window down.
A cattle truck went by on the highway, going west toward the mountains, and the wind of it lifted the end of his braid and set it down.
“You took Dad’s boots,” she said.
“They’re big.” He didn’t look up. “I put paper towels in the toes.”
His face was the color it had been at the camper, gray under the brown, and his lips had a blue edge. He was breathing with his shoulders. Every few breaths he pressed the heel of his hand into his breastbone and held it there and then let go.
She got out and came around the car and sat down on the curb beside him. The concrete was cold through her jeans. She took his wrist, and he let her, and she didn’t count out loud.
“You used to push me here,” he said. “In the running stroller. It was far then too.”
“It’s eight hundred yards.”
“I know.” He looked at the Red Wings. “I thought I’d get to the sign and then I’d know if I could.”
She had his pulse. It was doing the silverware thing again, a spill, a gap, a spill.
“Now you know,” she said.
He nodded. He looked up at the sign then, at the arrow pointing west, and the number, and then at the highway going off between the junipers toward the dark line of the mountains, where there was still snow on the tops from some other year.
“Drive me,” he said.
She’d known he was going to say it. She’d known since the bunk.
“After Pip’s first day.” She let go of his wrist. “Walk her in with me. She asked.”
He turned his head. She had her hands between her knees, one holding the other.
He looked at her hands. Then he put one of his own on the curb and one on his knee, and he got up, stopping halfway to breathe with his head down, and he walked to the car in Rob’s boots, lifting each one high so it wouldn’t catch, and got in.
◆
When she came out of the shower at a quarter past six he was standing at the stove in his socks with the Quaker canister in one hand.
He’d found it first try. It was in the cupboard to the left of the stove, where it had been his whole life, and he’d found the small pan in the drawer under the oven and the measuring cup on its hook, and he had water going. He’d rolled the sleeves of his linen shirt to the elbow. His forearms were all cord and old white scars.
“Is there butter?” he said.
She gave him the butter. He cut a piece off the end of the stick with a table knife, more than she’d have used, and put it in the frying pan and turned the burner on, and then turned it down, and stood over it. The butter melted and foamed up white and hissed. He didn’t stir it. He tipped the pan once and watched. The foam went down, and the kitchen began to smell like toast and hazelnuts, and little brown flecks came up from the bottom of the pan, and he took it off the heat at a moment Jo couldn’t see any difference in and set it on the cold burner.
“What else,” he said. “Something sour.”
She looked in the pantry. There was a bag of Craisins in the snack bin, half gone. He took one and ate it and made a face like a much younger person.
“They’re sweet,” he said.
“They’re cranberries.”
“They’re supposed to be sour.” He tipped a handful into the oats anyway and stirred them in. “They’re supposed to be cherries.”
He poured the brown butter over the top, all of it, and it ran in gold channels down through the oats, and he stood and looked at the pot the way she’d seen Rob look at a board he’d just cut, deciding if it was square.
Pip came in at 6:30 with Captain Otter by one leg and her hair flat on one side. Her feet were bare for once. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him at the stove.
He put a bowl on the table at her place and went back to the stove and didn’t watch her.
Pip climbed onto her chair and put the otter beside the bowl, facing it, and looked into the bowl. She picked out a cranberry and ate it. She took one spoonful and held it in her mouth for a count of five. Then she took another.
“What’s it called?” she said.
“It’s Senna’s porridge.”
“Who’s Senna?”
“My wife.”
Pip held her spoon in the air. “Grandpas have wives,” she said, to the otter, in the voice of someone confirming something.
She ate the whole bowl. She held it out without saying anything and he filled it again, and Jo sat down across from her with coffee and watched her daughter eat for the first time in eleven days without somebody saying three more bites.
“Look at her,” Jo said. “Rob’s seed.”
He was at the stove with the spoon in the pot. He stopped stirring.
“Seed,” he said, to the pot.
He scraped the spoon around the side of the pot, slowly, all the way around, and then he put the lid on.
Jo’s phone buzzed on the counter. DEE. She took it into the hall.
“I’ll be there at seven-forty,” Dee said. She was in her car; Jo could hear the turn signal. “I got her a sprinkle donut. Don’t tell her, it’s a surprise.”
“I’m taking her.”
“You’re—”
“I’m taking her, Dee. It’s her first day. I’m her mother.”
The turn signal clicked. Dee let it click four times.
“Is he still there?”
Through the kitchen doorway Jo could see the back of his white head over the stove and Pip beside him on her knees on the chair, leaning over to look into the pot.
“He’s leaving today,” Jo said.
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“She’s eating. I have to go.”
“Then I’m calling Rob.”
“Call Rob.”
When she came back in, Pip was on her third bowl. She was eating it slowly now, with her cheek on her fist, the way she did when she was full and didn’t want to be done. He was sitting across from her in Jo’s chair with his hands around a mug of hot water, and they weren’t talking, and it wasn’t the quiet of the car last night.
Pip scraped the last of it up and licked the spoon both sides.
“Toby,” she said. “Can you walk me in?”
Jo stood still in the doorway.
He didn’t look at Pip. He looked across the kitchen at Jo, and he kept looking, and Jo held on to the doorframe.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll walk you in.”
Pip nodded, as if that had been settled a long time ago. She got down off the chair and went to her room and came back with the purple butterfly clip and held it up to him.
He took it. He turned it over in his big fingers and pinched the wings to see how it opened, and it snapped shut on his thumb, and Pip laughed at him. Then he gathered the loose hair over her ear, carefully, with the short finger and the long ones, and he got the clip in on the second try, crooked, and Pip put her hand up and felt it and left it crooked.
◆
At 7:30 the kitchen clock said Jo had fifteen minutes to get everyone into the car, and Toby was in the bathroom, and she took the chance.
She went through the garage fast. She lifted the tarp off the job box and the boots were under the cord where she’d put them, and she took them out and went out the side door and around to the driveway and put the hatch up. Daylight had made the garage feel like a room anyone could walk into. The tire well had a lid.
She had the left boot down around the spare and the right one in her hand when she heard the side door.
Pip was standing at the corner of the garage with one rain boot on and the other in her hand. Jo had worked them off her feet at midnight and stood them by the dryer, full of sand from Dee’s sandbox. Pip had come to get them. She stood on one foot, holding the second boot, and she looked at the boot in Jo’s hand.
“Those are Toby’s,” she said.
Jo put it in the well. She folded it down on top of the other one and lowered the cargo floor over them.
“So he stays for your first day,” she said.
Pip considered it. She stood on one leg like a heron and got her foot into the other rain boot, holding on to the Subaru’s bumper, and stamped it down.
“You’re not allowed to hide stuff,” she said. “That’s a rule.”
“Get in the car, Pip.”
Pip got in the car. She buckled herself into the pink booster and put Captain Otter on her lap, and she looked out the side window at the house, and Jo shut the hatch, which closed with its soft expensive thunk.
◆
Calder Elementary was a low brick building on Sixth with a flagpole and a bus loop and a mural of a salmon going upstream that the PTA had painted the year Toby was in first grade. By five to eight the bus loop was full of idling cars and parents with phones out, taking pictures of children in front of the salmon.
People knew her. She’d known they would. It went through the crowd in front of the doors, heads turning one after another, a woman she’d cleaned the teeth of for five years putting her hand to her own chest. Then they saw who was with her, and it went through them again.
He walked slower than any of them. He wore his long oilcloth coat and Rob’s Red Wings with the laces wrapped around his ankles, and he held Pip’s hand, or she held his, the whole of her hand around his first finger, and Pip walked beside him in her rain boots with her backpack bumping on her spine and didn’t look at anybody. Jo walked on Pip’s other side. Nobody said anything to them. A man in a Les Schwab jacket stepped off the sidewalk into the grass to let them by.
Room 4 had a rug with a map of the United States on it and a name square taped down on every state. A lizard sat in a glass tank under a red heat lamp by the window, a bearded dragon the color of sand, with a sign on the tank in marker that said HI I’M CLEMENTINE. Ms. Delgado was a round, unhurried woman in her forties with a lanyard full of keys and reading glasses on top of her head, and she met each family at the door and said each child’s name as if she’d been waiting all summer to say it.
“Philippa,” she said. “Pip. We’ve been saving Oregon for you.”
She looked up from Pip to Jo, and her face did the thing everybody’s face had done since the lake, and then she found the man, and it did something else.
“Families are welcome to stay for morning circle,” she said. “There are chairs along the back.”
The chairs along the back were kindergarten chairs, blue plastic, a foot off the floor. He lowered himself onto one with a hand on the wall and sat with his knees up by his chin and his long coat pooled around him on the floor, and his hands folded on top of his knees. A boy in dinosaur pajama pants turned all the way around on his state to stare at him. He looked back at the boy, and when the boy didn’t turn around he lifted one hand off his knee and waved it, small, and the boy turned back around.
Jo stood against the wall beside him. There weren’t enough chairs.
“We’re going to go around the circle,” Ms. Delgado said from her rocking chair, “and tell everybody our name and who brought us to school today. Mason, can you start?”
Mason could. Mason had brought his mom. Aubree had brought her mom and her grandma. A boy named Kai had brought his dad and his baby brother, who was in a carrier on the dad’s chest, asleep with his mouth open. It went around the map of the United States, Washington and Idaho and Montana, and Pip sat on Oregon with her rain boots stuck straight out in front of her and her hands in her lap and waited.
When it came to her she stood up. Nobody else had stood up.
“I’m Pip,” she said. She pointed at the back wall. “This is my brother. He got old. Mom hid his boots in the car so he can’t go home.”
One of the dads laughed, a short startled laugh, and then stopped.
“Brothers aren’t old,” said the boy in the dinosaur pants.
“Mine is,” said Pip, and sat back down on Oregon.
Ms. Delgado’s face didn’t change. That was what Jo saw. It stayed exactly as warm and exactly as interested as it had been for Mason and his mom, and behind it, in the eyes, something wrote itself down.
“Thank you, Pip,” Ms. Delgado said. “Welcome to Room 4.” She looked past the children to the back wall. “And welcome.”
“Thank you,” he said, from the little blue chair. “I like your lizard.”
Pip got up off Oregon without asking and walked around the circle to the back wall and leaned against his arm, and stayed there, and Ms. Delgado let her.
Across the room, by the cubbies, a woman Jo knew was lifting her phone. It was Brenda Sparks, whose son Brecken was in Toby’s grade and had called him Jack-o’-Lantern for a week in the spring. She held the phone at her chest the way you hold it when you don’t want anyone to know, and it was pointed at the back wall. Jo watched her do it. She didn’t move.
◆
At the cubbies Jo knelt down on the linoleum. Pip’s cubby had a strip of tape across the top with PIP V. on it in Ms. Delgado’s marker. Pip hung her backpack on the hook with the otter’s head sticking out of the zipper.
Jo took her by both shoulders.
“Listen to me,” she said. “If you get lost, stay put. Somebody comes. I’ll come.”
“At school?”
“Anywhere. Say it.”
“If you get lost, stay put,” Pip said. “Somebody comes.” She looked at Jo’s face. “You’ll come.”
“I’ll come.”
Pip reached up and felt her clip, still crooked, and then she turned around and went to look at Clementine.
◆
They didn’t go home.
Jo drove out of the bus loop and around the block and parked on Seventh across from the playground, under a cottonwood, where she could see the kindergarten door and the fence and the painted hopscotch. She turned off the engine. He didn’t ask why. They sat.
The car ticked. A custodian came out and emptied a trash can and went back in.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Eight thirty-eight.”
He nodded. He had Rob’s boots up on the dash, which she let him do. He was looking at the school.
“They’re right there,” he said. “In the back.”
She had both hands on the wheel. The car wasn’t on.
“Pip said. In the car.” He didn’t turn around to look at the hatch. “Under the floor, where the spare goes. I used to hide my Halloween candy in there.”
She waited. She sat with her hands on the dead wheel and waited for him to open his door and walk around the car and lift the hatch, because it would take him thirty seconds, and she wouldn’t stop him. She knew she wouldn’t. She waited to see what she was.
He didn’t open the door. He sat with Rob’s boots on the dash and his hands folded on his stomach and watched the school.
“You said after her first day,” he said.
“Her day’s not over till ten to three.”
He turned his head to her then, and there wasn’t anything in his face that she could call angry. It was the face of somebody who had seen a thing coming a long way off, the whole length of a valley, and had watched it come.
He turned back to the school.
At 9:25 the kindergarten door opened and Room 4 came out onto the blacktop in a clump, screaming, and broke apart. Pip came out last. She stood in the doorway in her rain boots with the crooked clip, and then she walked straight across the blacktop, past the swings and the hopscotch, to the fence along Seventh Street, and put her fingers through the chain-link and looked at the cars.
He took his feet off the dash. He sat up and put his hand against the window glass.
Pip saw the Subaru. She let go of the fence and waved both arms over her head, the whole of both arms, like somebody bringing in a plane.
He waved back through the glass. He kept waving until a teacher’s aide in a yellow vest came and took Pip by the hand and walked her back to the swings, and Pip went, walking backward, still waving, and then she turned around and ran.
“What time is it,” he said.
“Nine forty-six.”
She started the car.
Larch was four minutes. She turned in at the corner by the park and saw the Tahoe before she saw anything else, white and green, parked across the bottom of her driveway with the gold star on the door, and a woman in a tan uniform leaning against its fender with reading glasses on a cord around her neck, looking at her phone.
Behind the Tahoe, pulled half onto the grass, was a white F-250 with a ladder rack.
Toby sat up.
“That’s Dad’s truck,” he said.