“Survival Dice,” Karen said, her eyes glowing. Their fight was forgotten. Who cared about the shitty house when we could starve together? I put my arms around Perley and held him to me until he wriggled and twisted, trying to turn himself to the fire. He liked to stare into the flames—like every other primate, Karen said—but I screwed my eyes shut. I hoped for Dog Paws, Snake Eyes, the Necklace, for the Squid. I hoped hard for doubles, and when I opened my eyes again, Helen had rolled double sixes, the Full Moon.

I drove to the IGA in town the next day, but the stakes were high, and I hardly knew where to begin. Perley was just starting solid foods. Perched regally in the shopping cart, he swung his arms out for pickles and olives, anything briny. But I was there for staples. I filled the cart with oil, rice, flour, beans, cans of tomatoes, cans of fish, a box of powdered milk, bouillon cubes. Back at home, Karen and Helen said I was cheating.

Cheating or not, I was glad that I had such foresight. The odds were against us, and as August wore down into September, we rolled doubles only twice, once Snake Eyes, once the Necklace. We spent most weeks working our way through what we had on the shelves. We developed a new taste for crawdads dug from the murky garden paths, bluegills netted from the creek, chickweed, the cattails that grew at the bottom of the driveway. But it was impossible to get enough. The crawdads and the bluegills were mostly bone or cartilage, the chickweed and cattails flared fast inside us and then went out. The meat we could get, possum, raccoon, or squirrel, we would savor, knowing it wouldn’t last. Helen’s passion for wild food didn’t match her skill in getting it. Most of what we had planted in the garden was either low-calorie or low-yield. We looked forward with urgent vigilance to the potato harvest, only to find that we’d grown enough to feed us for only a few meals, and not enough to store. The green beans, on the other hand, were so plentiful that for most of September they were nearly all we ate. I was ravenous, much hungrier than I’d been when I was pregnant. I came to love only two things deeply, Perley and fat. I woke from dreams of fat, thought of fat while I was driving in nails, caught myself admiring the crease of fat behind Perley’s knees. I dreamed of fat, and I ate what I could, and what I ate Perley drank from my body. As he grew, I shrank. But no matter what, I nursed Perley. No matter what, I saw to it that Perley thrived.

Karen and Helen might not have been getting much nutrition, but they were thriving, too. Thriving on self-satisfaction. They could barely contain themselves.