He shot up, strode away from the table, moving fast, grabbed his parka off of the wall hook, and wrenched the door open. “No g-damn peace,” he said, leaving the cabin, slamming the door behind him. Moments later, they heard the bus start up, spin out, drive away.

Leni looked across the table.

“Eat,” Mama said, and bent down for the fallen plate and glass.

After dinner, they stood side by side, washing and drying the dishes, putting them away on the shelves above the counter.

“You want to play Yahtzee?” Leni finally asked. Her question held as much enthusiasm as her mother’s sad nod.

They sat at the card table, playing the game for as long as either could stand the pretense.

Leni knew they were both waiting to hear the VW rumble back into the yard. Worrying. Wondering which was worse: him being here or him being gone.

“Where is he, you think?” Leni asked after what seemed like hours.

“Mad Earl’s, if he could get up there. Or the Kicking Moose, if the roads were too bad.”

“Drinking,” Leni said.

“Drinking.”

“Maybe we should—”

“Don’t,” Mama said. “Just go to bed, okay?” She sat back, lit up one of her precious last cigarettes.

Leni gathered up the dice and scorecards and the little brown and yellow fake-leather shaker, and fit them all back into the red box.

She climbed up the loft ladder and crawled into her sleeping bag without even bothering to brush her teeth. Downstairs, she heard her mother pacing.

Leni rolled over for her paper and a pen. Since Matthew had been gone, she’d written him several letters, which Large Marge mailed for her. Matthew wrote back religiously, short notes about his new hockey team and how it felt to be in a school that actually had sports teams. His handwriting was so bad she could barely decipher it. She waited impatiently for each letter and ripped them open immediately. She read each one over and over, like a detective, looking for clues and hints of emotion. Neither she nor Matthew knew quite what to say, how to use something as impersonal as words to create a bridge between their disparate lives, but they kept writing. She didn’t yet know how he felt about himself or the move or the loss of his mother, but she knew that he was thinking about her. That was more than enough to begin with.

Dear Matthew,

Today we learned more about the Klondike Gold Rush in school. Ms. Rhodes actually mentioned your grandma as an example of the kind of woman who set out North with nothing and found—

She heard a scream.

Leni scrambled out of her sleeping bag and half slid down the ladder.

“There’s something out there,” Mama said, coming out of her bedroom, holding up a lantern. In its glow, she looked wild, pale.

A wolf howled. The wail undulated through the darkness.

Close.

Another wolf answered.