“Open it,” Helen said. “We could publish this thing. We’re very professional up here, seriously. I think you’ll find this very reassuring.” Haloed by the steam of jellied deer brain, Helen grinned. Cobwebbed, lonely, misunderstood, the Best Practices Binder was yet Helen’s ace in the hole. She’d been waiting years to play it.

The intake worker thumbed through a few pages and stopped. “What’s this?” she asked. “Dump the shit bucket when it’s two-thirds full?”

So Helen closed her mouth. Simply, she saw what she’d done. So what? Can I forgive her? The only one I can forgive is Perley, who said eagerly, “It’s my job to shovel the shit pile.” He didn’t say it to be mean, or to complain. He said it because we’d trained him to be proud of all that he could do.

“Excuse me?” asked the girl.

Helen rallied. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s called humanure. We let it sit for two years before we put it on the garden.” Maybe she even hoped to make the intake worker laugh. But the girl never wrinkled her makeup with a smile.

“Do you have a toilet?” she asked. Perley hesitated like he’d heard that one before, but the girl gave him that private smile again. “You can tell me,” she said. “I won’t be mad.”

“We shit in a bucket,” Perley said. When he saw my face he said, “I mean poop. But if you only have to go pee, just do it in the woods. Don’t do it in the bucket because it starts to smell really bad. But it’s okay if you have an accident. Mama L and Mama K say that a lot of times with girls especially if they’ve had a baby, they poop and pee at the same time. They can’t really help it.”

Helen looked at me, but me and speaking were no longer on speaking terms. I had seen what good open mouths had done us, and I meant to keep my mouth shut. My tongue was dead. My lungs were flat. I had no voice. All I had were arms and hands to hold my boy against me until they pried him loose.

The intake girl’s fingers sped across her tablet, but with her other hand she kept turning the pages of the binder.

Helen, gone lame with desperation, said, “Let’s put that away. It’s probably boring. It’s not finished. It’s actually not even fact-checked, not completely.”

The intake worker thumbed. Stopped. Read.

“What’s Survival Dice?” she asked, and Perley was eager to explain.