I stayed sitting as Fellis left the room, and before he made it out of the house I heard Beth ask him nicely once more to chop wood. But Fellis ignored her and opened the front door and slammed it shut so hard the bedroom wall shook.

“That boy,” Alice said, and Beth told her never mind him.

I finished Alice’s thought for her—“is something else.” But then I wondered if she meant me.

The beanbag chair creaked when I sat up. I pulled the bed from the wall, peeled back the carpet, and took three twenties, one from each envelope. I stuffed them down into my sock and laced my shoe back up.

Neither Beth nor Alice said anything to me as I passed through the kitchen and living room and out the front door. Out back of the house, the sky had cleared enough for the sun to set red like light through a fingertip.

I picked up the axe and stood a log wobbling on a wide-cut oak trunk. I swung, picked up the split wood, and tossed it in a pile. Beth bought hardwood—ash—and so her house was always warm. My own mother bought softwood and sometimes late at night she’d shake me awake and we’d get in her white car and go down to the thick woods and I’d hurry through it to the tribal lumberyard on the other side and carry eight good logs back and dump it all in Mom’s trunk.

I wondered what she was doing.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Beth said as I brought in an armful of wood and dropped it in the wood box next to the woodstove. Alice and Lily were gone.

“He wasn’t going to do it,” I said, but Beth simply stirred a pot of something.

“You hungry?” she said. “I’m making fiddleheads and salted pork. And there’s moose too.”

I told her no, that I had to be somewhere. “Maybe later,” I said.

“If there’s any left,” she said, and she banged the ladle on the stove.

I snagged three more twenties from Fellis and left.

The woods were that dark shadow of dusk, and I followed a jagged, rough-rocked path, heading to the back of her house. I passed by a large boulder—rolled and placed back when the reservation was a burial ground. Couldn’t tell that to anyone, though, because people talked Pet Sematary. But it was true—this reservation was for the dead.

At her house, the lights were on, the blinds swept aside. I caught a glimpse of her. She was at the sink, her silver hair tied back. Then she was gone. Sitting on the cold, leafed ground for hours, I didn’t see her come back to that window.