The next few days, with Paige and Frick gone, the house was quiet. With the exception of the phone, which began to ring and ring for long intervals at least four times a day. I don’t know how many times I went to school during those days with them gone, but I know it was at least once. My science teacher talked about the solar system, and she told the class that in four to five billion years the sun will explode—she drew giant chalk scribbles over the chalk Earth she’d drawn on the blackboard. But she assured us that we, humans, wouldn’t be around to see it, that in the few million years before the sun explodes, it will first expand and swallow the Earth like food.

I asked my mother about it. She was sweeping with one hand and holding Bedogi in the other.

“I heard about that,” she told me. “It was on PBS one night.” She held the dustpan with her foot, and standing upright she swept the dirt onto the red plastic pan. “Would you dump that in the garbage?”

“So it’s true?” I said. “It’ll happen?”

“We’ll be long gone,” Mom said.

“But it will happen?” I asked again.

“So they say.”

“But do you think it will happen?”

“I think you need to come and get this dustpan and dump it, that’s what I think.”

Each day Bedogi stayed in Mom’s arms, and each day Mom sat on the couch or puttered in the kitchen cooking lunch and dinner for herself and me. I stopped asking about the sun, but I began to scrutinize it. Each evening, when it was setting and the woods golden, Mom walked the short path out behind our house with Bedogi, walked the loop, and showed him the oak and maple and birch trees, showed him Frick’s sweat lodge, and even brought him in there once. The whole time she was gone I tried with quick glances to make out the roundness of the setting sun through the trees to ensure it was still round, not swelling toward us. When Mom finished the loop she would give Bedogi to me, and I sat on the steps holding him while Mom repeated her walk alone. While she was gone, I told the boy that the sun looked round and fine.

For a week Paige and Frick didn’t show, and neither called. Or if they did, we didn’t answer. Mom had answered the phone once that week, and it wasn’t them or the hospital: it was Marla, Paige’s caseworker, wondering why Paige had missed her appointment. “I’ll have her call you when she’s back,” Mom said. “She’s out right now.” Marla never got the call, obviously, because Paige didn’t come home that night.