‘The scale says I’m down a pound,’ she told him.

‘Good for you.’

He didn’t think one pound would make any difference. Twenty pounds might, but that wasn’t going to happen. His mother binged on diets to lose ten pounds, and then she binged on junk food to put on fifteen. She wasn’t fat, but her panties and T-shirt were both a size too small for her current weight.

It was just the two of them. Ross and Jessie. That was the way it had been since he was eight years old, when his father took a page from a Springsteen song and went out for a drive and never came home. Fifteen years had passed since then. Jessie in and out of jobs. Ross in and out of school. They’d spent most of those years in a little apartment in Fargo. His mother worked security at a local mall, and her boss was a former high school coach confined to a wheelchair. She spent most of her time straddling his lap. Wheels didn’t turn bad people into angels.

When the boss’s wife found out about the affair, he fired Jessie. She found a bus-stop-bench lawyer who wheedled a settlement out of the mall owner, and they used the money to get out of Fargo and buy a small house in the town of Gary, southwest of Duluth. That was a year ago. Jessie took part-time security jobs when she could get them. Some months were flush. Some weren’t.

Ross had applied for jobs, but he couldn’t wash the contempt off his face at interviews, and after a while, he gave up. He spent most days hiking in the woods. Sometimes he went far north, almost to Canada, taking with him only what he could carry on his back and living off the land for days at a time. That was how it was supposed to be. Man. Nature. Values.

He lifted his mother’s feet off his legs and stood up. He slipped off his camouflage jacket and hung it on a hook behind the front door. Jessie noted the shoulder holster and revolver without comment. Her own philosophy was to make sure you had a gun within reaching distance of your fingers at all times.

He went to her bedroom at the end of the hall, where the twin bed was unmade. The gun safe was on the wall. He undid the combination lock and stored the handgun in a sleeve on the door. There were six others. The safe allowed room for more than a dozen rifles, too. It was full.

With the safe open and the hardware in front of him, Ross heard a knocking on the front door.