Stefan started work at the lumberyard a week later. I don’t care what anybody else says, I think almost everyone who can work, wants to work. Everybody wants to feel good and be able to talk about work—to talk at work, to have a place to show up at regularly where you’re expected and at least minimally respected. At the lumberyard, Stefan made friends. As the winter wore on, he joined the basketball league and bowling team, pursuits he once would have considered ludicrously geezer. Stefan talked all the time about his coworkers Cal and Casey, twin brothers just a year older than he was, who’d started working at the mill the weekend after high school graduation and had already earned so much, living at home and living frugally, that they wouldn’t have one cent of college debt. There was a woman named Katie who sewed team sweatshirts for everyone and an old guy everyone called Pearl, who built harps on the side. Especially, he talked about his uncle, Andy, whom Stefan considered the stand-up guy of the universe.

It was Andy who called our home phone from the hospital emergency room that glowering afternoon. I picked up.

“Stefan is in surgery...now wait, he’s not in any danger. He’s not going to die. He’s not hurt like that. But there was an accident, an incident.”

“Tell me, Andy.”

“I’ll meet you here. I’ll explain.” He hung up. Jep was already walking in the door; my sister Amelia had called him.

“No,” I whimpered.

“Let’s just get there, and then we’ll figure everything else out,” Jep said.

At the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, we made our way through the maze. When it was built, the hospital was billed to be a marvel of modernity, but instead turned out to be something out of Alice in Wonderland, a place with no evident plan or sense. We ran to the first door we saw and then down one of the corridors that branched away like the halls in a cruise ship, past abandoned wheeled carts loaded with medical supplies. A rainstorm had started, and a sudden darkness turned the windows to opaque mirrors where I glimpsed my own face coursing rainwater tears; my shocked, rumpled hair. It was only the third time in twenty years that I’d been in any hospital—the first, right here when Stefan was born, the second, that night in Black Creek when Belinda was in surgery.

We finally came upon a woman at a long counter, all alone. A novel sat open facedown in front of her, along with a bowl of tomato soup and a sleeve of crackers.

“Hello,” I said. “Hello, please, we need help.” With a sigh, the woman glanced up. “I’m looking for Stefan Christiansen. He’s in surgery.”

“Surgery for what?”

“He was in an accident.”