“Whatever is asked of us,” the president’s wife continues, “I am sure we can accomplish it.”

Papa shakes his head. “These boys have their faces blown off at breakfasts. They burns alives.”

Athena barks again and Mrs. Boydstun clenches her forehead with trembling hands and the hundreds of porcelain children on their shelves—holding hands, jumping rope, carrying pails—seem suddenly charged with a terrible power.

“Now,” says the radio, “we will go back to the program we had arranged for the night.”

Papa says, “We will shows these Jap fuck-fuckers. Boys oh boys we will shows them.”

Five days later he and four other men from the sawmill ride to Boise to have their teeth counted and their chests measured. And on the day after Christmas Papa is on his way to something called boot camp somewhere called Massachusetts and Zeno is living with Mrs. Boydstun.

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

2002–2011

Seymour

As a newborn, he screeches, howls, bawls. As a toddler, he will eat only circles: Cheerios, freezer waffles, and plain M&M’s from a 1.69-ounce package. No Fun Size, no Sharing Size, God help Bunny if she offers him Peanut. She can touch his arms and legs but not his feet or hands. Never his ears. Shampooing is a nightmare. Haircuts = impossible.

Home is a weekly motel in Lewiston called the Golden Oak; she pays for her one room by cleaning the other sixteen. Boyfriends roll through like storms: there’s Jed, there’s Mike Gawtry, there’s a guy Bunny calls Turkey Leg. Lighters flick; ice machines grumble; logging trucks rattle the windows. On the worst nights they sleep in the Pontiac.

At three, Seymour decides he cannot abide the tags on any of his underwear, nor the rustling certain breakfast cereals make against the interiors of their plastic bags. At four, he shrieks if the straw in a juice box rubs the wrong way against the foil it has been struck through. If she sneezes too loudly, he trembles for half an hour. Men say, “What’s wrong with him?” They say, “Can’t you shut him up?”

He’s six when Bunny learns that her great-uncle Pawpaw, a man she has not seen in twenty years, has died and left her his manufactured double-wide in Lakeport. She closes her flip phone, drops her rubber gloves in the tub of Room 14, abandons her cleaning cart in the half-open doorway, loads the Grand Am with the toaster oven, the Magnavox DVD all-in-one, and two trash bags of clothes, and drives Seymour three hours south without stopping once.