He wiped his hands across his face and turned to the boy who couldn’t care less if Calvin was hungry, cold, dead or alive. Salty would always get better treatment than any human from a child like this. Calvin could see the cold man in the child’s eyes and grieved for what he would become. He looked into those little brown eyes and smiled. The boy hesitated, then smiled back. He could smell chocolate cooking, like when his Grandma was alive and she used to make those things with rice crispies and put them in little folded paper cups. There was laughter. He could hear it faintly in the distance and it sounded like the way his Mom used to laugh before Dad left and they came to live here. It was so lovely and warm and safe.

He had three two-dollar bills inside his glove that his Mom’s new boyfriend had given him to go and get some candy. But this man needed them. He didn’t want any candy anyhow. It didn’t taste the way those chocolate rice crispie things used to. He pulled the money out of his glove and handed it to the man. It felt good. He wasn’t used to giving folks things.

He stood in the park with Salty licking his bare hand, watching the old man walk away towards town, and the boy heard another tinkling peal of laughter that was so like his Mom’s. Or was it just the ice breaking on the river, smashing into shards and bumping and spinning away downstream? It didn’t matter. It felt real good.

She couldn’t look any more at the little boy that Jess wanted to cuddle. His haunted eyes avoided hers every time she tried to reel him in with a smile. She looked instead out through the window as Jess struggled into her coat and saw her son looking through the passenger window of the Toyota with eyes that were not dissimilar.

She snapped her head back round into the lobby. ‘Thanks, Mrs Chaney. See you tomorrow.’

‘Prompt if you can please, Mrs Hunt.’

‘Prompt.’

Katie swept Jess up into her arms and bundled her out to the car. Billy was withdrawn again. Gerry, waiting at the school gates, had brought him to her car ten minutes ago with a grim smile.

‘How’s Sam?’

‘Fine. Look, Gerry, I don’t know what to say. How to apologize to you both.’

‘Then don’t.’ Gerry’s face was full of friendship and love. She wanted to kiss him. Instead she carried on defending the indefensible acts of her husband. ‘He’s sick. We all know that now. We’re waiting for an appointment from Calgary.’

‘And you?’

‘Good,’ she lied.

‘Do you need us at all? We’re around.’

Katie had shaken her head, then as Billy crawled into the car she’d enquired with her eyes how her son was.