Frick opened the camp door. “Go,” he said. “Just go.”

Mom had one foot on the bucket and the other still in the camp. “I didn’t know that,” she said. “Frick, I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do,” he said.

“You can talk to me,” Mom said. “You can talk to me.”

“Talk to you about what?”

“I know what that loss is like,” she said.

“No, you don’t,” Frick said, and he pushed the door shut but Mom pushed back.

“Goddamn it,” she said.

The door stayed open between them.

“I do know what it feels like,” she said. “Like the whole world is warped, like something is off balance that will never be balanced again. And guess what? It won’t ever be balanced again. Every morning’s deformed, the day so close to spinning out of control, but you have to find your footing, your own balance.”

“Well maybe you’re throwing off my balance,” he said. “You ever think of that?”

“Listen,” she said. “You need to understand I can’t give you what you want. And even if I could, it wouldn’t fix anything. I know that.”

Mom looked at me and then at Frick.

“Why can’t you?” Frick said. “I want to know.”

Mom stepped off the bucket. “You want to know?” she said. “You really, really want to know?” She started for the car. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you why.”

And Frick started to follow, stepped down off the blue bucket and onto the ground. I was at the car door, opening it, and then Frick stood still.

“He’s hungry,” Frick said, nodding at me.

“I can wait,” I said. I remember feeling ourselves closing in on something, something important, some unnamable thing that like a jointer could straighten the boards upon which we walked.

But Frick insisted, and I felt he pulled us away from it. He already turned back to the camp door, stepped up on the bucket, and pulled himself up.

“He has to eat,” he said. He stood in the camp by the door, waiting for us to follow, and when we did—Mom first and then me—he closed the door.

Frick boiled fiddleheads and sautéed salted pork on the gas stove, and while the fat sizzled and the water gurgled and the window screen next to the table where Mom and I sat whistled in the sharp wind, a pipe banging somewhere underneath the cabin, our silences rested deep amid the noise of cooking and breathing.

“Corinne was thirteen,” Frick said. His back was to us while he cooked. “She was like David,” he said. “Hated hunting. Wouldn’t talk to me when I brought back deer or elk or moose or geese or swan. Especially swan. Only hunted it once.” Frick laughed. “She told me and her mother that she wouldn’t eat meat, that she heard of other ways that didn’t include death. Where would a six-year-old hear that?” Frick laughed again, stirring the fiddleheads.

He cleared his throat. “A few weeks after her mother disappeared, we were on were on Rosebud.”