Frick used both hands to set the bowl of fiddleheads and salted pork on the table. His face glossed and shined. He went to the cupboard and grabbed three bowls and three cups.

“But that dirt road was narrow,” Frick said. “I was going slow, but Charlie wasn’t.”

Frick sat. He looked at me, looked at Mom, and he shook his head. And then he stopped shaking his head, and started to nod, like he’d come to some conclusion, some agreement that could only be made with himself and the details.

“She was sleeping,” he said. And then again, “She was sleeping.”

Frick took my bowl and filled it high, then he set the bowl in front of me. Then he filled Mom’s bowl, and then his own. I held the bowl, warming both my hands. Frick scanned the table, looking for something, and his looking made me look too, made me think that what we were looking for was important, so important, and we were both searching for it together, looking sometimes at each other and then back at the table, trying to learn if something was missing or was in fact right there at the table with us.

It was Mom who figured it out.

“I’ll get them,” she said, and she went to the drawer by the sink and got three forks.

. . .

In the evening, after Frick fed the spirits—there by the shallow stream, under the gray-blue sky, mumbling a prayer he’d never let me hear—Frick’s truck wouldn’t start, and so we left it there with the locked-up camp and drove back in Mom’s car, Mom driving, Frick in the passenger seat. I leaned my head against the cold window.

“I don’t need to know why,” Frick said to Mom. He watched the trees go by as we drove down the dirt road.

“But you do,” Mom said. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“Show me what?” Frick asked.

But Mom said, “Tomorrow.” She drove with both hands on the steering wheel, and she went slow, and rightfully so. When we hit Route 1, I realized no one was going to speak, just sit and ride, and I wondered what Mom would show us. I wondered about tomorrow.

When we were almost home, riding over the bridge to the Island, I sensed that even though their problems were their own, there was no escaping how those problems shaped us all, no escaping the end, like the way the ice melts in the river each spring, overflowing and creeping up the grassy banks and over lawns, reaching farther and farther toward the houses until finally the water touched stone, a gentleness before the river converged on the foundation, seeping inside and flooding basements, insulation swelling, drying only when the water has receded. What remained was a smell, a reminder that the water had come and risen up and would rise again, in time. I would never forget that car ride or that night at home: because we all found that smell, literally, and it was not subtle.