I reached in to hug him, and at the first touch of my hands against his upper arms he stiffened so violently that I nearly jumped back. But I hugged him anyway, my hands light and the pressure soft, and patted him on the shoulder.
He nodded and scratched above his ear, and I trudged back up the stairs to bed.
* * *
By the following Sunday Cade had found a job as a shift manager at a hotel seventeen miles down the road, in Liberty Gorge, the first real town south of us. The pay was menial and the job a joke compared to what he was capable of, but work was scarce in the area and it was the best he could do. On Monday, after his morning chores, he donned the cheerful blue-green uniform shirt and headed off to field complaints about broken showerheads, unpalatable food and groups of noisy teenagers.
I wished for an escape as pleasantly menial. It hadn’t taken long for me to realize that “the Powell house”—the peach-painted cinder-block cottage tucked in the side yard of the main house—was little more than a formality, a place Dodge and Candy could claim as their own without ever spending any waking time there. Candy homeschooled her sons from the dining-room table of the main house, beginning with the Pledge of Allegiance each morning at 8:00 a.m., followed by prayer, followed by unqualified chaos. It amazed me that Elias managed to spend every day around her and remain so preternaturally calm all the time. Seven days and I felt ready to snap.
Late one morning, when I couldn’t handle listening to one more minute of Candy’s creationist science lesson, I gathered up the heap of garden peas from the kitchen island and took them out to the front porch. As soon as the screen door slammed, two deer bolted away from the vegetable garden on the house’s eastern side. I clucked my tongue in annoyance and sat down to shell the enormous pile, already feeling better just to be out in the fresh spring air, away from the cloud of smoke that blanketed the house’s interior. Out front, the Olmsteads’ rooster, Ben Franklin, strutted in a slow circle around the yard like a one-bird security detail. He was a strikingly beautiful creature. His comb and wattles were bright fuchsia, and from the top of his head down to his saddle feathers his coloring shifted from orange to pale yellow to deep red. The luxuriant tail was peacock-green and shimmered in the light. I admired him from a distance, knowing he was probably territorial. I’d spent the whole previous summer as Dave’s chicken-class teacher, teaching others how to feed and raise such birds, castrate the males so they could be raised for meat, and at the end of it all, slaughter them humanely. I knew how to manage birds like Ben, but I wasn’t foolhardy enough to walk into his space right away.
A green Jeep slowed in front of the house and abruptly pulled into the driveway, driving all the way up to where Cade normally parked. The door opened with a metal-on-metal screech. The kid who stepped out of it looked to be about eighteen, with spiky auburn hair and wire-rimmed glasses. I knew right away—based on his resemblance to a certain Muppets character—that this must be Scooter. I’d heard Elias mention the guy who rented a room from the Vogel family one farm over and helped out Dodge with the self-storage place. He nodded a greeting and smiled at me.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he called. “Is Elias awake?”
“I don’t think so. He usually sleeps till about one.”
The guy nodded again. His earnestly good-natured face looked comical above the rest of his body, clad as it was in baggy woodland camo pants, a white crew-neck undershirt and black combat boots crusted with mud. He held out his car keys and, a little bewildered, I accepted them. “Just tell him his stuff’s on the front seat, along with his change.”
“Okay. Don’t you need your keys?”
“They’re his. It’s his Jeep.”
He raised a hand to say goodbye and began hiking back up the road toward the Vogel farm. I started to walk back into the house to put away the keys, but then considered that I should probably bring his loose change inside, too. It hadn’t taken long for me to determine I didn’t trust Candy’s Matthew. Among the end-of-the-world rations in the Olmsteads’ basement were cans of something called “carbohydrate