Mom rose from the table and went outside, and I followed, wiping tears from my eyes, and in the silent cold we stood in the driveway, waiting for Frick.

Mom started up again. A slow laugh at first, then it built and climbed up higher and higher—she couldn’t stop. I didn’t find it funny anymore—she looked like she was about to collapse.

Frick came from out back and stepped into the porch light. He held out and away from him something large and oval like a saucer sled. It dripped, and the smell came right at us again, stronger than in the house.

“Found it,” Frick said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A snapping turtle,” Frick said. It was decomposing, rotting from inside its shell. “Must’ve crawled up there and died. How it got in, don’t know.”

“It died in our house!” Mom said. She was breaking—it was that kind of laughter. “The house killed it!”

“You all right?” Frick said, and he brought the turtle to the side of the shed and dropped it into the hard snow.

I looked at Mom: she leaned on the car and shook and shielded her eyes with her hand like a light somewhere was blinding her. And then the laughter turned to tears and she cried hard, the kind of hard tears you laughed at after.

“What’s a matter?” Frick said. He moved closer.

“It’s dead,” Mom said.

“Way dead,” Frick said, and he nodded at me to go inside. He pulled Mom from the hood of the car, and followed after me into the house, where he guided Mom down the hallway and into her room and put her to bed.

The house still smelled. Not a little—a lot. It reeked, but it smelled better than standing outside while Frick held the rotting turtle in front of us.

Frick took a shower, and when he came out I smelled the sweet shampoo.

“Good night, David,” he said from the hallway, and I heard Mom’s door click shut. In the quiet, I looked at the clock, but I couldn’t see the time. I spread out on the couch, wondering how deep we’d all rest, wondering, again, about tomorrow.

. . .

In the morning, Frick cooked breakfast. Fried eggs, moose meat. Mom made biscuits and gravy. The sun burned bright, and the sky was a crystal blue. The house smelled a bit of the turtle, but it was hard to distinguish between it and the cooking and woodsmoke.

Mom and Frick joked about the turtle while they made breakfast together. I sat at the kitchen table. My chest was feeling heavy, a pressure building up—the beginning of a cold.

“I thought you were done for,” Frick said. “The way you were laughing.”

“I don’t even remember seeing the turtle,” Mom said. “Was it big?”

Frick turned, eggs splattering. “You want to see it?”

“No way,” Mom said. Then she turned to me. “David,” she said. “Take this knife and go get some turtle meat. It’ll go good in the gravy.”