“It was a test. You failed.” She closed the screen door. “After you’re through communing with nature, please come inside. And shut the door behind you. It’s freezing this morning.”

He laughed. “It’s not that cold,” he said.

But she had already closed the door, and he stood alone on the porch, looking out across the acres of ponderosa pine at the rocky crags of the ridge on the other side of town. The thin trail of campfire smoke had grown larger, dissipating, a gray stream in the blue ocean sky. He took another deep breath, hungry for summer, longing to breathe in that delicious freedom, but something had changed and the odors on the breeze brought with them something bittersweet, a vaguely familiar fragrance that awoke within him a subtle sense of loss he couldn’t quite place.

The mood gone, he turned away from the railing. A hummingbird buzzed his head on its way to the feeder next to the kitchen window as he walked inside the house. Trish had already started breakfast and was busily cutting up slices of homemade bread for toast. She had relented a little on the bran cereal, but not much, and an open cardboard cylinder of oatmeal sat next to the pot on the stove. A pitcher of orange juice stood on the counter next to her. She looked up as he entered the room.

“Wake Billy up,” she said.

“It’s summer,” Doug said. “Let the boy sleep if he wants. It’s vacation time.”

“I don’t want him wasting his whole day sleeping.”

“His whole day? It’s six-thirty.”

“Just get him up.” She returned to her bread, carefully slicing the round loaf into thin equally small pieces.

Doug walked loudly up the stairs to the loft of the A-frame, hoping his exaggerated footsteps would awaken the boy. But Billy’s still feet were sticking out from under the sheet at the head of his bed, and his head on the pillow at the wrong end of the mattress was covered and unmoving. Doug walked across the rug, stepping over the underwear, socks, shirts, and pants strewn over the floor. Sunlight was streaming through a crack in the green curtains, a wedge of brightness illuminating the posters of rock stars and sports figures on the slanting wood roofwalls. He pulled the covers off his son’s head. “All right, bud spud. Time to get up.”

Billy moaned incoherently and reached groggily for the sheet to pull over his head.

Doug kept the sheet out of reach. “Rise and shine.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

One eye opened to squint at the watch hanging by a string from the sloping wall above his bed. “It’s only six. Get out of here!” He reached again for the sheet, this time more aggressively.

“It’s six-forty-five actually. Time to get up.”

“Okay. I’m up. Leave!”