This man—he wasn’t his father. Grey remembered now. It wasn’t just the belt he was using and it wasn’t his father who was using it; his father had been replaced by this man, this man named Kurt who’ll be your daddy now, and by this feeling of being torn up inside, the way his real father had torn himself up in the front seat of his truck on the morning it had snowed. Grey couldn’t have been more than six years old when it happened. He awoke one morning before anyone else was up and about, the light of his bedroom floating with a glowing weightlessness, and right away he knew what had called him out of sleep, that snow had fallen in the night. He threw the cover aside and yanked back the drapes of his window, blinking into the smooth brightness of the world. Snow! It never snowed, not in Texas. Sometimes they got ice but that wasn’t the same, not like the snow he saw in books and on TV, this wonderful blanket of whiteness, the snow of sledding and skiing, of snow angels and snow forts and snowmen. His heart leapt with the wonder of it, the pure possibility and newness of it, this marvelous, impossible present waiting outside his window. He touched the glass and felt the coldness leap onto his fingertips, a sudden sharpness, like an electric current.

He hurried from the window and quickly drew on jeans, thrust his bare feet into sneakers, not even bothering to tie the laces; if there was snow outside, he had to be out there in it. He crept from his room and down the stairs to the living room. It was Saturday morning. There’d been a party the night before, folks over to the house, lots of talk and loud voices that he’d heard from his room, and the smell of cigarettes that even now clung to the air like a greasy cloud. Upstairs, his parents would sleep for hours.

He opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. The air was cool and still, and there was a smell to it, like clean laundry. He breathed it in.

Grey. Look.