After the concert, we crossed the street to the lunch counter at Townshend General Store and ordered french fries to go.

It was almost nine, and they were closing. We couldn’t sit at a table to eat. “How are we going to eat in the truck?” I asked. “I can’t even move my arms.”

Ezra shifted and flipped a fry into the air in the crowded truck cab, catching it in his mouth.

I tried it too.

Ezra rarely missed, but my fries ended up all over the truck, behind the bench seat, in Mrs. Trent’s hair. One dropped into Gran’s lap.

Ezra and I couldn’t stop laughing. We got Gran and Mrs. Trent laughing too.

It hurt, laughing that hard, all squeezed together, but we couldn’t stop. It’s a wonder Gran didn’t have an accident.

When I ran out of french fries, I grabbed Mrs. Trent’s nearly full package—like she was family or something.

“Nyle,” Gran snapped.

I felt a zap, like the electric fence.

“I’m sorry.” I handed the fries back to Mrs. Trent.

“Take them,” Mrs. Trent said. “I am having more fun watching you eat them anyway.”

But I wouldn’t take them back. Ezra took them instead. Before long he had us all laughing again.

The next week, Gran drove Mrs. Trent and Ezra into Montpelier for an appointment with some state people. They hoped to figure out how Mrs. Trent could get hold of some money.

“Nyle, you stay here and go to school,” Gran said. “After last week, there’s no question about all of us going. The truck can’t take it. Anyway, someone has to stay behind and mind things.”

The old knot tightened. What if Gran came home alone? What if Ezra and his mother found a better place to stay? What if they moved thousands of miles away, to the west coast, or back to Israel with Mrs. Trent’s family? She’d had another letter from them.

After school, I entered the empty house, did the chores, fixed a snack. I tried working on an essay for history. I couldn’t concentrate. In my closet hung several dresses. I never wore dresses. I remembered Mrs. Trent in her seedy outfit at the concert, I remembered Gran saying my clothes wouldn’t fit Ezra but they would fit Mrs. Trent.

Taking the dresses off their hangers, I folded them into a neat pile. I pulled clothes from my drawers, too.

Padding downstairs, I placed the clothing for Mrs. Trent on the kitchen table and searched for Bayley, or Caleb, any living thing would do. But the animals had curled up together by the stove. It would have been cruel to move them. Outside, Shep sat alert in the back pasture. At four months he was almost as big as the yearling sheep.

I stoked the fire and carried the pile of clothes down the hall to Ezra’s room.

Light spilled through the open doorway. The room was bright now, the curtain pulled wide open. Yellow shafts of sun slanted in, dappling the floor, warming the bed.