You’d love it here. Just ate the best burger of my whole life. Had coke and fries with it and everything.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in what he’d been eating. I was. It was that none of his postcards touched on the only thing that mattered to me: the exact time and day he’d be back. So, yeah, he might have missed me a little, but I missed him a lot. A lot. It was the worst summer in living history. My history, that was. No one had ever been as bored as I was. I’d have put money on that. And if anyone ever had been, they probably hadn’t survived to tell the tale. I slept as much as I could. I tried to pass the days that way. Around midday, my mother shook me awake.

“Go play outside,” she said. Every day it made me want to scream. I was a sophomore in high school. As if it wasn’t enough that I was way too old to be told to go out to play, I didn’t fucking well have anyone to play with. If I grumbled too much, she’d give me a little shove to get me moving. “Out, out, out. Out you go. Wolves grow big in the mountains.”

Given my mood, my mother was lucky she was what she was: a formidable woman. She was only a little over five feet tall, but there was a steeliness about her that no one could miss. I always thought of steel when I thought of my mother. She had long silver-gray hair, down to her waist. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. She told me once that she went gray before she turned thirty. Maybe that was why I thought of steel when I thought of her. Her skin was dark without tanning and her eyes were almost black. There was something else about her, something small, but you’d probably notice it if you were to meet her, which is the only reason I mention it. Her left arm was shorter than her right, and that hand was wizened and curled in on itself slightly. It was a birth defect.