Anouk watched Red stride back across the lawn, empty-handed.

‘I’m sure I saw that box the other day,’ he said, coming into the kitchen. He was slowly scratching his beard, the place he often looked for what bamboozled him.

Nora reached for the telephone mounted on the wall and dialled. The toast popped.

‘Who’re you calling?’ Red asked.

‘Jody might have some.’

Red smiled at Anouk. ‘Got your shoes?’

Nora hung up the phone. ‘He’s not answering.’

‘I’ll pick some up for you,’ said Red. ‘I’ll go now.’

‘You’ll be nearly an hour there and back.’

‘Well.’

‘This is stupid. There was a whole box. It’s here somewhere.’

‘I’ll just go,’ said Red, flipping his Toronto Blue Jays cap on to his head. He gave the peak a little shuffle left and right before settling it in the middle, the hair at the back of his head sloping into its usual ducktail.

‘Red,’ huffed Nora, staring into the sink.

As promised, Red returned less than an hour later with sandpaper, and now he and Anouk were bumping along a dirt road towards the home of Red’s friend Fraser. Fraser was American. He was one of the draft dodgers Nora and Red had met in Toronto, and now he lived here and operated a sugar shack, where he boiled sugar-maple sap into syrup. Anouk’s favourite time to visit the shack was late March, or early April, when the nights were still freezing but the days brought on the thaw. In those months, the sap flowed the clearest and with the greatest pressure from the trees, and that was when Fraser tapped them with metal spiles, collecting the sap in aluminum buckets that hung from hooks nailed into the trees. He tapped until the leaf buds unfurled. Over wood-fuelled fires in the shack he boiled the sap in stainless-steel vats, and the smoke, sometimes backlit from the sun and rimmed so fiercely with light it almost looked like the smoke itself was on fire, that smoke would rise up into the blue sky over the naked black branches of the sugar maples. That was when the snow was the prettiest, the spring snow, kind of oldish with a sparkling top crust of paper-thin ice, pocked with bits of black forest debris and sticks and the frozen stills of animal prints. There was the deep-cold smell of the ground defrosting and there was the soft spring light, caster of the long shadow through trees, ghosts’ legs laid over the snow. When the tapping and the boiling was at its height, Fraser paid a guy with a horse and hay cart to take people for rides through the maple bush, and that was the best part of the whole thing, lying back on the moving planks of wood, bits of golden hay sticking into your neck, looking up at the sky and the black branches passing over you. The horses creaked leather and metal and other bits of tack; steam rose from their snouts and they shat hot apples of chewed hay into the snow. Outside the shack, Fraser would fill a trough with snow and pour into it wavy lines of hot, extra-thick syrup, and after a few seconds collect the cooled taffy on to popsicle sticks.