I went back outside and around back of the house to where a dark green tarp covered a cord of wood. The tarp crinkled and dumped water when I lifted it. I stacked seven logs of ash in my arms and carried the load back inside. The bark was digging at my forearm, and I felt a piece slipping loose, so I hurried down the hallway and came to the wood box, and as I got close to it, the pieces started to fall, but I lunged forward so all the wood fell directly out of my arms and banged and rattled into the box.

“That’s how it goes,” Grammy said. She smoked her cigarette. “Don’t carry so much next time.”

I filled the wood box in two trips.

“Well, I have to—”

“You eat?” Grammy said.

“No,” I said. “I should get home and do that.”

“I’ll cook you something. Go on, have a seat.”

I didn’t want to stay, didn’t want to be alone with her too long, but I decided to remain with her, and I was glad I did. She turned more lights on in the house and I sat at the kitchen table and she fired up the stove and fried me up two greasy eggs and drippy strips of bacon and two slices of toast with raspberry jam on it and told me a joke about a brown bear wiping its ass with a white rabbit. And after I ate the food, after I made her tell me the joke one more time—my laughter making her laugh—and after she took my plate and rinsed it and covered the dirty dishes with a cloth as was our custom to tell the spirits to stay away—that there was no food for offering—she handed me a freezer-burned orange creamsicle. And when she turned off all the lights and ushered me in front of the TV in the living room, I saw smoke, yeah, but I saw Grammy and myself under all of it, all of it hanging over us.

She turned on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to figure out in the dim lighting if my creamsicle was dripping over the plastic wrapper and onto the couch, and so I ate the creamsicle as fast as I could so as not to make a mess. My mouth was cold and numb.