“Dad,” she forced out. “I don’t hate your dad. I just don’t agree with some of the decisions he’s made.” She tried to roll toward the sewing basket but couldn’t even turn over. A blaze of pain shot up her leg. “Why did you say he doesn’t hate me?”

“Well . . .” Charlie said, as if needing to buy himself an extra few seconds. “Sometimes I complain about you to him, and he tells me that you only want the best for me and there’s no way Mom could get along without you.”

This was news. “What do you complain about?” Grandma Rose asked. She couldn’t help asking.

“Nothing. Stupid stuff,” he confessed. “You made me eat spinach once after my mom said I didn’t have to eat it.”

“Spinach is good for you. You can’t live on ice cream, you know.” She discovered that she could move the fingers of her right hand and started wiggling them, probing for a weakness—a seam, maybe— in the tape. Joe hadn’t bound her impossibly tight.

“Has anyone tried?”

“Tried what?”

“To live on ice cream. I mean, people are always saying you can’t live on ice cream or cookies or candy bars or whatever, but do they really know that?”

“I think it’s a pretty good guess to say that you can’t live on ice cream.”

“There are Eskimos who live on nothing but fish! I bet they used to say, ‘You can’t live on fish!’ But they were wrong. Eskimos do.”

“Tell you what, Charlie. If you ever ask me to cook you only fish, I’ll be more than happy to do it,” Grandma Rose said.

Charlie laughed. Grandma Rose laughed too.

A sickening sawing sound echoed from the kitchen. Charlie’s laugh turned to a whimper.

“Listen to me, Charlie,” Grandma Rose said. “You have to concentrate on my voice. You can’t hear anything else, okay?”

“Okay,” the boy murmured.

“Can you move at all?”

“No.”

“Can you roll?”

“I’ll try.” Charlie wiggled in his cocoon, then began rocking until he built up enough momentum to turn over. “I did it!”

“Good!” Grandma Rose said.

“What should I do?”

The awful sawing grew louder. Grandma Rose tried not to dwell on the pain Joe was enduring. He was probably dead already. She wanted to say good riddance, but she couldn’t blot out the thought that—despite the fact he’d put a bullet in her leg—he was actually a good man beneath it all. Misguided, but good.

“Grandma?”

“Charlie, I want you to roll over to my chair. Beside it, in the basket, are my sewing tools. There’s some scissors in there.”

“But we can’t even use our hands!”

“One thing at a time,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “Go get the scissors.”