“Maybe,” Wilson says. “How about a snow fort later, Isabelle?” he says, though the minute he says it he wishes he hadn’t, or that he hadn’t phrased it as a question, which he knows will go unanswered. Instead, he thinks, he should have made some sort of statement, like Later, I am going to build a snow fort, if anyone is interested. But already he’s posed the question. It hovers. He shovels a bite of food into his mouth. “If it’s the right kind of snow, I mean. If it’s too light, it won’t stick—but if it’s light, it’ll be good for sledding, so we could do that. I’m going to do one or the other anyway, if anyone’s interested.” But this, too, makes him uncomfortable once uttered. Because what if Isabelle is not interested? He imagines himself alone out on the lawn, making snow bricks for a fort, or whizzing solo on a saucer down the hill across the street.

He thinks of Africa. “Oh, also, I thought I would dig up those slides of Africa. I think it actually might be a good idea for a trip.” He looks at Isabelle for some reaction, but she is busy peeling back a layer of biscuit.

“You should do that,” Ruth says. It pains her to see Wilson so powerless in the face of their daughter’s silence. “I’d like to see those slides,” she says. “I think it would be funny to see Daddy as a teenager,” she says. She wants Isabelle to smile for Wilson; he is trying hard, she knows. “Picture it, Isabelle.” Both Ruth and Wilson look at their daughter. Isabelle reaches for the salt.

Ruth sips her coffee. “Wil,” she says. “Didn’t the vet call and say we could pick up Maggie early?” Maggie, their Newfoundland, has been at the animal hospital since Thursday, when she had a tumor removed from a lymph node on the side of her neck; they are scheduled to pick her up on Tuesday.

Wilson regards his wife, mildly alarmed. “Did he?” he says, looking her searchingly in the eye.

“Didn’t he?” Ruth says, giving him a look. “He said we could get her tomorrow, right?”

Wilson hesitates. He is about to say that no, the vet said no such thing, that Ruth must be mistaken, but then he follows his wife’s gaze toward Isabelle, who is looking up hopefully at him from her breakfast with what he’s sure is the trace of a smile in her eyes; she loves this dog more than almost anything in the world. He swallows. “That’s right,” he says. “The vet said that you and Isabelle could pick her up tomorrow.” He looks at his daughter, and she is smiling. He looks at Ruth, and she is smiling. Wilson smiles, too.

IV

All day, she has not been able to get the knot with which she woke out of her hair. She hasn’t tried that hard, she thinks; she’d worked at it for only a few minutes before breakfast, and then she’d spent the better part of the day drawing in her sketchbook, a charcoal drawing of her mother at the kitchen counter.