“People don’t want to go home,” a nurse said, pausing beside us, ice pack in her hand. “They don’t have heat there.” She bent the ice pack, releasing the chemicals with a crack, and handed it to Grayson. I thought of graduation: Lisbeth’s mama and her hand warmers. It seemed like years ago.

Someone moaned in a corner by the gift shop, and the nurse headed off to see to them.

“You want to tell me what you were doing in my woods?” I asked Grayson.

“I didn’t know it was your woods.”

“I didn’t see a car. How did you get all the way out there?”

Grayson folded the ice pack over his foot. He had taken his boot off, and in the harsh, yellow light of the clinic waiting room he looked younger. The beard scruff on his face could have been new. No lines spread around his eyes. “I got a ride from some guys at the restaurant. I ran out of firewood and wanted to go somewhere nobody would notice if I took a little. The guys dropped me off and I hiked into the woods. I thought, if somebody lived in those woods, they wouldn’t mind.”

“Stores sell firewood, you know.”

“They used to.” Grayson adjusted his ice pack. “When was the last time you were at Walmart?”

“My idea of hell,” I said.

“Well, the space heaters are gone now. They sold out weeks ago. Back-ordered, I guess. There’s a run on sleeping bags, blankets. Grow lights.”

“Grow lights?”

“Things are getting bad,” Grayson said. “You might not know because you’re out there on your farm.”

It was true. I could go for a week without going into town, maybe longer. I could make the groceries stretch. It was a thirty-minute drive into town in good weather, and I had made the trip less and less since I had been by myself. I wasn’t sure what stopped me. Snow or ice. Worrying about the roads. I waited until too late to set out. The sun sank earlier and earlier in the afternoons, and I didn’t want to be driving much after dusk, coming back alone to a house both empty and dark.

I think I also didn’t go because I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me. It was a small town. And small towns talk. Some people knew my family had left. The men at the feed store were already throwing in bags of fertilizer for free, offering to carry stuff out to my car, help me load. They weren’t hitting on me. Men who had known me longer than a heartbeat, or who were familiar with Lobo’s temper, had stopped trying stuff with me a long time ago. It was pity I saw in their eyes now.