Bay was gone one week, two. I couldn’t bear it any longer. At dinner I asked Dice, “Where is he?”

“Finding new family,” he said.

“But he should go to my mother’s house and get it over with,” I said.

Dice smiled. “He’s careful,” he said. He squeezed my wrist. “Nervous heartbeat,” he said. I wanted to hold fast to my concern, as though being concerned would help my mother. But my moods always changed, without my control, sad into happy into sad, tumbling in the bright stream.

* * *

When Osha and Cuke took off their bandages and joined us at the table, we celebrated. We roasted a whole deer. We made a cake with candles in it and sang special songs.

Osha and I mended sweaters, darning the moth holes and patching the elbows. I couldn’t look at her face. I only looked at her hands.

“How are you feeling?” I said. Osha and I had not spoken since Isaac’s visit.

“Frightened,” she said.

“I can imagine—”

“About the environment,” she said. “The end is near. Siberia will melt. The rain forests will burn down. The oceans will stop mixing. And the wars will start.”

She couldn’t help me with the sewing for long before she complained of a lightning headache. She went to lie down. Neither she nor Cuke worked much anymore.

* * *

That night there was the most brutal storm yet. We could hear the trees and branches writhing, the wind whipping, the wind shoving itself into the cracks of our bedrooms. No one could sleep in such a mess. I dropped down from my high bed, floorboards like ice against my socked feet, and crept to the kitchen. I found a dozen people there already, red and black in the firelight. The rain stopped: it had become snow. We hummed the Sacred Harp tunes until the fire dried our throats. This, this, this was what I had been looking for. Love, community. My worries left me, and I was limp with gratitude.

I’d fallen asleep next to Rainer and when I woke his arm was across my front, and as I blinked the rainbow-edged sleep from my eyes, Rainer’s arm was for a moment Bay’s arm.

It was dawn, and the dining room was bright as midday, washed in brilliance. The dirty white walls and floor looked like marble, luminous. An end-of-the-world hush had come over our holler. The snow rose all the way to the porch. Nothing moved. I thought about the bears and the squirrels, sleeping in their trees and caves. This was the real world. I lay under Rainer’s arm until the first milkers dressed themselves to go to the barn.

At breakfast, Gemini made his new bullets such bright silver, they looked enameled white.