She returned with something in each hand, shaking the objects in the firelight before us. Whiskey or wine bottles, it might have been, from somebody else. But that wasn’t Jamey.

She held tins of powdered milk and cocoa. “Hot chocolate! Girl,” she said to me, “you’ve been holding out on us.”

Jake had called me girl. The men who came to the farmhouse did, too.

I watched Jamey try to open the tins with her teeth.

“Now wait a minute,” Grayson said, “what if that is the last hot chocolate in the whole world?”

“Then we better enjoy it,” Jamey said.

I would bury my money in the ground, hide it in my shoes or a Pepsi can, carry a heaviness in my pocket even if I never could fire it, just to have the weight there. That was my way, that was what my family had taught me. Jamey would pick locks and scavenge and steal. That was what she had been taught by whatever passed for kin and home for her, that was how she had survived.

Dance found mugs and a saucepan, and the three of them bent over the fire, setting the grate from the grill over the flames and mixing the powered milk with water. I sat back and watched.

When Grayson placed a mug in my hands, the steam enveloped my face and chest like a hood. “You okay, Wil?” he said.

I wrapped my hands around the mug. “Sure.”

He plopped down beside me on a log we had pulled next to the fire, his leg still heavy at his side. Dance began to tell a story, and Jamey scooted up next to the fire ring, wrapped in a plaid blanket, her eyes as big as headlamps. I looked at the three of them: Jamey; Dance, talking with his hands; Grayson, his hand on his boot like an old man. We might have been friends from high school or college, if any of us had gotten to go to college. We might have been on a weekend trip, a reunion, a vacation.

Except Grayson’s boot was starting to smell from rot or infection. He needed someone to look at his foot again; he needed a doctor. Jamey had a scar on her neck. The skin there looked pebbled. I thought it was a burn. A pot handle or a poker or a firecracker had seared her, not long ago. It had not healed right.

We might have been friends, on an escape from our lives, the four of us plus the baby, just camping, except for the stories we told.

“I think it’s Earth,” Dance said. “Rising up.”

“But if spring never comes back, if it just gets colder and colder, won’t Earth die, too?” Grayson said.

Dance shrugged the way he did. I had never known someone to make more noncommittal movements. The firelight made his shadow long and spiderlike. “Maybe it’s time.”