﻿David had often seen the woman and child around the museum.

They came once a month, the boy eager, the mother patient, the two of them a perfect example of why he did this work. And now he’d scared them off. She’d asked the question, hadn’t she? How was he supposed to know she didn’t want an answer?

He didn’t have any reason to feel guilty. “Ma’am?” That sounded all wrong. Ma’am didn’t suit her.

Their rush out the door slowed, then stopped. She directed the boy to a cutaway view of hibernating insects and rodents before rejoining him.

“If you were going to apologise, it isn’t necessary. You were trying to do your job. My son will be fine.”

“I wasn’t going to apologise.”

That ticked her off. “What did you want, then?”

Her phone number, for one thing. The thought came out of nowhere. He had no business wanting her phone number. “The gift shop has a very good book about the mammoth, if you’re interested.”

“Does it? Thank you.”

A dismissive smile and they were on their way. The boy was speaking in an anxious tone, the mother trying to soothe. She was good at conveying a mother’s certainty. What she didn’t seem to realise was that it wasn’t helping.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caron Todd grew up surrounded by books, listening to her parents’ stories and watching her father, a journalist, working at his manual typewriter. She always liked writing, but became a nurse and then a library assistant before a family holiday in the Alberta badlands inspired her first romance novel. She was born in France, where her father was stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and she now lives with her husband in Manitoba.

Dear Reader,

The premise for A Different Kind of Summer came to mind after I watched The Day After Tomorrow. Leaving the cinema, I was surprised to step into a warm, soft spring night instead of a hostile, icy world. If the movie had that effect on me, even for a second, I wondered how a young child would respond to it. What would happen if a single mother got home from work to find that the babysitter had let her five-year-old son watch the video?

I wasn’t sure how my editor, Laura Shin, would feel about the idea of a romance novel set against a background of climate change – after all, some of my relatives were asking me how that could be romantic – but to me, love found during troubled times is the most romantic of all. I was so glad when Laura told me to go ahead, because, like my heroine, Gwyn Sinclair, I had always preferred not to think about the problem and simply hoped it didn’t exist. This story gave me a chance to read about it as widely as time and my unscientific brain would allow. More happily, it took me back to my early motherhood years, with all their worries and joys.

It also took me back to Winnipeg, Manitoba, my home town. The area where Gwyn and David Bretton live is a composite of a few real neighbourhoods made graceful and welcoming by rivers, ageing houses and big, old trees. For a short time the story moves to another of my favourite places, Whiteshell Provincial Park. I’ve enjoyed so many afternoons and holidays there, hiking, canoeing and reading in the shade.

I hope you enjoy getting to know Gwyn and David, and the people who are important to them. Hearing from readers is always a pleasure. If you’d like to get in touch you can reach me at ctodd@prairie. ca.

Yours,

Caron Todd

A Different Kind of Summer

CARON TODD

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To my children, with hopes that you’ll like the

view in 2050. Thank you for your support – your

patience with fast food during deadlines, your

insights and, of course, for making me laugh.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My thanks to Dr John Hanesiak of the Centre

for earth observation Science at the University

of Manitoba for taking the time to provide

detailed answers to my questions about weather

and climate change. Without him, I wouldn’t

have known about David’s remote control plane

or rooftop weather station! of course, any

mistakes or misunderstandings that may have

found their way into the book are

completely due to me.

CHAPTER ONE

“OF COURSE IT COULDN’T HAPPEN, sweetie.” Gwyn sat on the bed and stroked her son’s cheek. When he didn’t lean away from her touch she felt even more annoyed with the babysitter. Then with herself for needing one. “It was just a movie.”

Now he did pull away, with an irritated wriggle. “I know it was a movie.”

Did he? He so often surprised her, expressing ideas that seemed advanced for his age one minute and showing a complete lack of common sense the next. Maybe all children were like that. Iris had told her about a boy down the street who was convinced Bruce Willis had really saved the planet from an asteroid.

What was Mrs. Henderson thinking? If she wanted to rent a video instead of playing or taking a walk, what about Shrek for a five-year-old? Or Aladdin? Not a disaster movie, especially one that showed the poor kid’s entire country getting flash frozen. Chris knew where Winnipeg was on the map. He knew that according to The Day After Tomorrow he and his house were under ice right now. No, from what he’d told her, it was worse than that. He and she and everybody else in the neighborhood were ice right now.

He looked so small in his bed, nearly edged out by stuffed animals. The boy-size giant panda from his grandparents had pretty much taken over. It was his favorite. He liked the realistic ones the best, the panda and the tiger and the polar bear. Anything related to nature and science got his attention. Animals and plants, earthquakes and volcanos, rocket ships and the solar system. None of it had scared him before.

“You know,” she said, “the hero in the movie wasn’t really a scientist. He was an actor saying his lines. The way you did in the play at Christmas.”

“Somebody wrote the lines.”

“Sure, but not a scientist. A screenwriter, making up a story. Just like somebody made up Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Do you think mother and father bears really live with their children in pretty cabins with furniture and porridge?”

He almost smiled. “Maybe.”

“An ocean couldn’t flood a city so quickly. Could it?”

“Maybe it could.”

“All that water, freezing in seconds? It doesn’t make sense.”

“They said there’s a mammoth, a real-life mammoth, frozen solid with grass in its mouth.” He emphasized the last words. Grass in its mouth. “A real mammoth, Mom. That part wasn’t make-believe.”

Her feet were aching, and she really wanted to have a cool bath and change her clothes. She knew there was a point she was supposed to be getting about this animal but she just wasn’t. “So it died during dinner. These things happen. Maybe it took too big a mouthful and choked.”

“Then it froze.” He tried to snap his fingers. They rubbed together with hardly a sound.

Now she got it. A real mammoth froze instantly, like the flood waters and the people in the movie. “An animal that big freezing all at once, right down to the meal it was eating? Do you believe that, Chris?”

“They said.”

“People say all kinds of things. I promise, cross my heart, there’s no such creature. We’ll go to the museum tomorrow and prove it. How’s that?”

He nodded, but he still looked worried. He didn’t even ask if they could go to the gift shop for astronaut’s ice cream.

“Ah, hon. Come here.” Gwyn held out her arms and Chris climbed onto her lap without hesitation, the way he used to do. The panda fell behind him, grabbing more space in the bed while it could. She tried to memorize the feeling of small limbs and back curled against her, and the smell of soft hair under her nose. One day soon he wouldn’t accept this kind of comfort. Not even on a bad day.

“I wish we’d seen the movie together. We could have had popcorn and laughed whenever it was silly. That’s what your dad would have done.”

Chris looked at the wall across from them. Enough light came through the window that they could make out the mural they’d painted together during her holidays last summer. Considering she didn’t have the slightest spark of artistic ability and he was four at the time she thought it had turned out pretty well. Blue sky and white clouds, smooth green for grass with tufts spiked here and there where they’d tried for realism, trees with bird nests on branches and a small, square house with a triangle roof and white-petaled daisies by the door.

No stick-figure family, though. Instead they’d hung photographs, all of Chris’s father. Blowing out three birthday candles, riding his bicycle, draping Bay of Fundy seaweed over his head. By the middle of the wall, he’d grown up. In one picture he wore his high school graduation gown, in another he held a salmon as long as his arm. The last two showed him standing beside a Canadian Forces helicopter, and smiling with Gwyn on their wedding day.

“Your dad knew all about the weather. He had to, to be in a flight crew. What do you think he’d say about huge sheets of ice springing up all over the place?”

“What?”

“He’d say, ‘Nonsense. Couldn’t happen.’” Not quite. His choice of words would have given the message some added energy.

Chris stared at her with Duncan’s eyes—intent, dark blue. They weren’t showing any of Duncan’s lightheartedness, though. That was something she didn’t see in their son very often. Shouldn’t a boy named for Christopher Robin be more playful?

“You’re not scared of it, Mom?”

“Not for a second.”

“I’ll check the weather one more time. Okay?”

He climbed off her lap and ran to the living room. Over the droning hum of the air conditioner Gwyn heard the television come on, snippets of music and talking as he rushed through the channels, then a woman’s soothing voice mixing the forecast with motherly advice.

“Across the Prairies we’ll see above normal temperatures again tomorrow and for the rest of the week. The humidity will make it feel even warmer, so be sensible if you need to be active outside. Drink lots of water and remember to use sunscreen. That’s especially important in the middle of the day when UV levels will be at their highest. Firefighters and farmers have been asking for rain, but it looks as if they’ll be waiting for a while yet.”

Maybe that would reassure him. After an early spring and more April showers than they’d known what to do with there wasn’t a drop of moisture in sight, let alone a brand-new wall of ice.

DAVID BRETTON LAY as flat as he could in the bottom of the canoe. His life jacket lumped under him, his knees jammed hard against the canoe’s center thwart and the edge of the seat dug into the back of his head.

Drifting downstream without looking where he was going was a dumb thing to do—he could hit a log or other debris—but he didn’t think he was creating a hazard for anyone else. He was alone on the river. There were no motorboats, no teams from the canoe club, and there were never any swimmers. No one chose to swim in the Red River. The currents could suck you down, silt clouded the water and he didn’t even want to think about the bacteria count.

He shifted his weight, trying to find more room for his legs, but only managed to bang his knees. The view was worth a few bruises. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see trees and the tall, narrow rectangles of downtown buildings. Traffic and crowds and noise receded. Looking up instead of ahead was as good as a holiday. It gave him a different perspective, filled his mind with quiet and a sense of timelessness that he sometimes welcomed. The planetarium captured that: the small band of human activity hugging the ground and the vast sweep of sky above.

A very clear sky right now. No sign of wind or even a breeze, no dusty haze, no cloud, no contrails. Just a pink and violet sunset in the west and a slowly darkening blue everywhere else. Plain sailing from the ground to the thermosphere. The only sign of an upward boundary was the moon. A crescent tonight.

It looked so still up there it gave the impression nothing was going on. Not true. Plenty was going on. Air masses swirled all the time, moving heat from the equator and cold from the poles, deciding—along with the ocean currents—how each day would be. How everything would be.

Even the water he floated in, this warm, dirty liquid, was part of the cycle. It flowed in from Minnesota and North Dakota then up through Lake Winnipeg and eventually found its way into cold, clear Hudson Bay. He told schoolkids who came to the museum to think of human circulation, blood carrying oxygen and nutrients all over the body and helping to regulate its temperature. Most of the time they looked at him with blank, incurious faces—how could the Earth be like a human body?—but sometimes he saw understanding click into place.

The jet stream was invisible, but it was up there, too. Misbehaving lately, curving way up north, drawing warm gulf air into the Hudson Bay lowlands. Thirty-one degrees Celsius in Churchill today. What was that in Fahrenheit? High eighties. The polar bears must have thought they’d been thrown into some southern zoo.

Balancing his weight so the canoe wouldn’t rock, David sat up. His plan had been to relax and get some exercise, take his mind off work. Good luck with that. His mind was always on work. It was why Jess had left him. Three years ago now—longer than they’d been together.

“Everything is science with you,” she’d said one evening after dinner in the middle of what he’d thought was an enjoyable washing-up conversation.

“Everything is science,” he’d replied. It was true, but a bad answer under the circumstances.

Her voice had gotten louder. She’d told him he didn’t have a drop of romance in him. It must have really bugged her, because she’d underscored the point. “Not a single drop, David.” Accusingly. By then he’d been annoyed and he hadn’t seen that this discussion was different from the others. So he’d started to explain the science of romance. Next thing he knew he was divorced.

Two sentences—one, really—that summed up the problem. Everything was science. He took an evening on the Red with a setting sun and a faintly glowing ivory moon and riverbanks full of trees and turned it into a satellite image of the weather.

That didn’t bother him—in fact, it suited him fine—but he’d never met a woman who was okay with it. Even the weather girl he’d gone out with for a while thought meteorology had its time and place, generally at twenty minutes past the hour on the morning, noon and evening shows. He didn’t get that. It wasn’t incidental: it was central. The history of humankind was firmly tied to weather and climate. So was its future.

David shifted onto his heels, then dipped the paddle into the water, sweeping it in shallow arcs from back to front and front to back. The canoe began to turn. As it came around he felt the catch of the current. Closer to shore it would be less powerful, but he stayed put.

Right hand on top of the paddle, left on the shaft, he reached ahead and dug the blade into the water. He pulled it through and lifted it out, a quick count, no breaks between or he’d be going north, the way the river wanted. He put the strength of his whole body into each stroke and soon sweat poured off him. His shoulders and upper arms burned.

Just when he was ready for a break he rounded a loop in the river and the current was gone. He took a minute to work the ache out of his muscles, then continued paddling at a leisurely pace.

This was a quiet spot, his childhood playground, behind the backyards of the street where his parents still lived. Through the trees he caught glimpses of the screened porch and a light in an upstairs window. They’d be settling down, feeling dozy, weighing the immediate benefit of tea with lemon versus the annoyance of getting up during the night. He’d be seeing them for breakfast in the morning. A hot breakfast. Something must be up. Nothing bad, though. They hadn’t sounded worried when they called.

One more stretch of hard paddling and he was home. Mosquitoes found him as soon as he drew alongside the wooden dock. Swatting with one hand, he lifted the canoe to his shoulder and carried it to the boathouse. He used his building’s back entrance and took the service elevator to the twenty-second floor. His door locked behind him as it closed.

He gulped two glasses of water, then drank a third more slowly on his way to the shower. He turned the tap off to soap up, on to rinse. Air drying helped him cool down a little more, then he climbed into a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms and switched on his laptop.

Two rows of charts appeared on the screen. Temperature, humidity, dew point, air pressure, wind speed and direction all measured and graphed by his rooftop weather station. No surprises there. The past twenty-four hours had been hot, humid and still—just as his body told him.

He clicked on a series of radar and satellite maps. There was a typhoon off the coast of China, monsoons in India, torrential rains in Europe. A tropical storm had developed over the Atlantic—Elton, the fifth named storm of the season even though it had just begun.

The number of severe weather events concerned him, but not as much as what was happening in the North—thunderstorms from Alaska and the Yukon through the Northwest Territories to Nunavut. For the first time in their lives Inuit above the tree line were seeing lightning. And robins—the traditional sign of a southern spring. Only Baffin Island was getting snow instead of rain.

David opened the drapes and went out to the balcony. From this height in the daytime he could see the Red flowing through farmland south of the city and meeting the Assiniboine to the north, at the Forks. At night the water was mostly black, silvery here and there, reflecting city lights.

No point staring at the sky. Whatever happened he wouldn’t see it here before the collected data warned him. Still, he came out and looked first thing every morning and last thing at night.

That wasn’t scientific at all.

GWYN PULLED the kitchen curtains, closing out the lights from the apartments along the river. Mrs. Henderson had left dishes in the sink. She had a list of things she would and would not do, a list that changed to suit her mood. For the most part meal dishes were fine, but not snack dishes. She didn’t mind heating home-cooked food waiting in the fridge, but wouldn’t so much as open a tin on her own. If a drink spilled, she’d wipe up the main puddle, but leave a general stickiness behind. She wasn’t there to clean, she said.

Tonight Gwyn didn’t have the energy to be annoyed. All she wanted was to ease the burning in her feet. She washed and dried the plates and glasses, put them away behind leaded glass cupboard doors, then shook Mrs. Henderson’s dinner crumbs from the newspaper and refolded it. The main headline, two inches tall, stared up at her.

Typhoon Strikes China: Hundreds Dead, Missing.

Underneath that article, in smaller letters: Elton Bears Down on Caribbean.

She turned the paper over so she couldn’t see the headlines, then went down the hall to the bathroom. Chris still moved around in bed, talking quietly. His own voice alternated with a very deep one. The panda never spoke and the tiger mostly growled, so she guessed he was having a conversation with the polar bear. Getting advice about life on an ice floe, maybe.

Best not to disturb him. She shut the bathroom door quietly. When the tub was half-full, she stepped into the water and leaned back, gasping when her overheated skin touched cold porcelain. Her eyes closed and her tired muscles began to relax.

It had been a long, difficult evening. They’d had two deaths on the ward. Both were expected. That didn’t make anything easier. They were two people she had greeted every shift and tried to make comfortable with back rubs and sheepskin under their heels and fresh ice water to sip, and this evening she’d helped take them to the morgue instead. She never got used to that trip.

When she first started working at the hospital—for the summer between grades eleven and twelve—the head nurse wouldn’t let her go. All the staff had been protective, maybe because they knew her mother or because she was only sixteen. “Sweet sixteen,” everyone had said and of course one orderly had always added, “and never been kissed.” That wasn’t exactly true, but she’d never done any kissing without dwelling on the logistics. A couple of years later she’d met Duncan and all her how-to worries had gone out the window. Her worries and her education. So here she was on a different ward, but still an aide, ten years later.

By the time Gwyn dried off and changed into shorts and a sleeveless blouse, Chris had fallen asleep. In case he called, she left the storm doors to the porch and the living room open and went out to the front steps. The sun had set, but light still glowed in the western sky. People were out on bicycles or walking their dogs, taking advantage of the day’s best weather.

“Hey, you.” Her neighbor, Iris, appeared carrying a plastic watering can.

“Hey. I don’t suppose you watered my lettuce?”

“I did. And your carrots and your beans.”

“Thanks! I was joking.”

Iris emptied the can into a pot of marigolds, then cut across both lawns to join Gwyn. “That babysitter of yours had all the windows open and the TV going full blast.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll talk to her.”

“I beat you to it. She was on the phone when I came over. Had Chris parked in front of the set.”

“You won’t believe what movie she rented.”

“Sure I would. I heard every line.”

Gwyn suppressed an urge to apologize again. “Do you know any responsible, grandmotherly women who would enjoy spending time with Chris?”

“Seriously?”

“Maybe.” She’d never fired a babysitter. Usually they left under their own steam because their circumstances changed or because she gave them too few or too many hours.

“I’ll ask around. Between us we should be able to find someone who’s willing to read stories and play checkers now and then. It sounds like a great job description to me!” Iris held up a hand. “Don’t even think it. Unless you’re offering a pension and a dental plan.”

“How about all the tea and coffee you can drink and some genuine appreciation?”

“Hah.” Iris stood up, brushing the back of her shorts and retrieving her watering can. “Back to the lion’s den.”

“That doesn’t sound good. What’s the matter?”

“Dear daughter is irritated with me.” Molly was older than Chris by several years and growing out of a pleasant, companionable stage. “I interrupted an hour-long phone conversation to tell her to get ready for bed, but I know she’ll still be talking when I go in. Tomorrow she’ll be in a fog all day and she won’t be able to study for exams. There’s too much work, she says.”

“Summer holidays are nearly here.”

“That’s what scares me.” Iris waved and headed back to her house.

She didn’t seem to be joking. Gwyn hoped things weren’t getting that tense next door. Molly had a stubborn streak, but she liked to be in her mother’s good books.

The last light from the sun had disappeared. Gwyn loved this time of day, the calm and quiet, the big old elms dark against the sky, the air scented by the clove currant she and Duncan had planted when they first moved in. They’d put a pink explorer rose beside it, hosta and bleeding heart in the shade and cranesbill geranium and creamy-white day lilies in the sun. They had liked the same kinds of plants, old-fashioned ones that went with childhood springs and summers.

Even though the neighborhood wasn’t far from the center of the city, it felt like its own small town. That was what they’d liked about it. There was a corner store and a community center and row after row of modest houses built in the 1920s and ’30s. The yards were planted with crab apple trees and lilacs, lily-of-the-valley and peonies with blooms so heavy they touched the ground. Closer to the river specialty shops and three-story houses nearly hidden by hedges gave the streets a different character. Her dad had told her that her great-great-grandfather had done the carpentry in some of the houses. She wished she knew which ones.

She slapped a mosquito. If one had found her, more were sure to follow. She took the steps two at a time into the porch, where they could buzz against the screen all they liked but never reach her, and settled into one of the high-backed willow rockers that faced the street.

We’ll watch the people go by, Gwyn. That was what Duncan had said when they’d bought the chairs. It was funny because wherever he went he could never keep still. So she’d rocked while he paced to the window and the door, making plans, then back to her side to tell her she was beautiful.

He would have erased Chris’s fears in no time. Nothing scared Duncan, and being with him made other people feel as confident as he did. He would have enjoyed the movie and laughed and said it was silly, and Chris would have believed him.

Tomorrow after they went to the museum, he’d believe her, too. Better yet, he’d forget about sheets of ice by morning and get back to his usual worries—the lack of a desk or any homework in kindergarten and his inability to go to Mars anytime soon.

CHAPTER TWO

BUT CHRIS didn’t forget. When Gwyn woke up the next morning he was kneeling in front of the television in his pajamas, frowning at the screen. His polar bear sat on his lap.

“There’s a hurricane,” he said. “First it was a tropical storm but now it’s a hurricane. It’s got a name. Elton. Did you ever see a hurricane, Mom?”

“We don’t have hurricanes on the Prairies.” She knelt beside him. “Here’s our forecast. What’s in store for us today?”

“Sunny.”

“That sounds all right.”

“They give the weather for the whole world. It’s windy where Grandpa and Grandma live.” He pointed at the lower end of Nova Scotia.

“We’ll have to phone them soon, won’t we?” Gwyn got up from the floor and went into the kitchen. “Pancakes?”

When the bowl and spoon clanked together Chris hurried to join her. He reached into the fruit basket for a banana, took a plate from the cupboard, a fork from the drawer and dropped the peel into the garbage before starting to mash. He was organized in the kitchen, just as Duncan had been, cleaning up spills as soon as they happened, putting used dishes straight into the sink. Maybe there was a mop-up, put-away gene. She had a more haphazard approach.

“So, Mom?” He sank the fork through a section of banana, lifted it and pressed again. “The weather’s been the same every day, did you notice?”

“Hot.”

“Yeah, hot, no rain. For a long time, right?”

“What do you make of that?”

“Dunno.” He handed her the plate of banana and watched as she scooped the fruit into the batter. “It doesn’t sound very icy.”

That was almost a joke. Things were looking up. “It sure doesn’t. And it sounds consistent.”

“Yeah. Consistent.” He nodded appreciatively. As far as he was concerned, the more syllables a word had the better. “That must be good. Do you think so, Mom?”

“I wasn’t worried to begin with.”

He looked at her doubtfully and she suddenly felt she had failed at something. He let her off the hook. “You didn’t see the movie.”

“And you didn’t wash your hands.”

Guiltily, he rubbed them on his pajamas.

“I don’t think so. Off you go.” She called after him, “Get dressed while you’re at it, okay? Nice clothes, because we’re going to the museum after breakfast.”

She put the first cooked pancakes in the oven to keep warm and spooned more batter into the pan. Eight tiny circles this time, then one pan-size. The contrast would amuse him.

THE SMELL OF FRYING SAUSAGES greeted David when he let himself into his parents’ house.

“Is that you, David?”

“That’s me.” He went down the long hall past the turret room, the living room and the dining room to the kitchen, where he found his mother in her nightgown, spatula in hand. Her hair, still a natural dark brown with only streaks of gray, was tousled as if she’d just gotten out of bed. In spite of the clear signs that she wasn’t ready to be awake and busy there was a bit of a sparkle to her. Again, David wondered what was up. Something good, it looked like.

He handed her a pint basket of strawberries. “See what Johansson’s had this morning? They’re farm-fresh, no pesticides, grown an hour from the city.”

Miranda held the fruit close to her nose and inhaled deeply. “Lovely! Picked by virgins in the moonlight, were they?”

He never knew how to respond when his mother said things like that. “They’re early for a local crop. The warm spring must have accelerated the plants’ maturation.”

Looking amused, she kissed his cheek and put the basket in the fridge. He supposed that meant he wouldn’t be having any.

“You find me less prepared than I’d intended. Sausages take such a long time to cook. Why on earth are they considered a breakfast food?”

“Want me to watch them while you get dressed?”

“Would you? Thank you, dear.” She handed him the spatula and hurried away. He heard her footsteps light on the stairs, a door closing and then silence.

He stuck his head into the hall. “Dad?” The rooms he’d passed heading to the kitchen had all looked empty, but his father could be burrowed in a corner somewhere with the Saturday Globe and Mail.

The house was too big to search while he was responsible for the sausages—it had three stories, including a turret room on every floor. The neighborhood kids used to call it The Castle. Richard might not even be inside. He could be in his workshop, or out for his morning constitutional, or at the end of the yard trying to hook a breakfast catfish. David used to try to catch them, too, he and Sam, while Sarah went on about horrible, awful, cruel boys.

He rolled the sausages over, counting as he went. Even if they could eat six each there’d be leftovers. That definitely suggested an announcement. For his parents, food and announcements went together.

Once—he was in high school at the time, grade ten or eleven—his mother had tried to make Chicken Kiev from scratch. He’d never seen her so exasperated. She’d shaped sticks of garlic butter and wrapped pounded, torn pieces of meat around them. As she’d worked, egg and bread crumbs had encrusted her hands and got dabbed here and there whenever she needed to scratch her nose or push her hair out of her eyes. Finally, a row of breaded lumps had sat ready to cook. She’d said with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, “They’re not pretty, but they’ll be absolutely delicious!”

As it turned out they came apart in the deep fryer, making a greasy sort of stew. His dad had taken them to A&W instead, and there his parents had announced they were moving to Africa for a year or so, leaving their regular jobs—Miranda was a producer at a local TV station and Richard was a mechanical engineer—to teach in Zambia. The kids could come, too, they said, or move in with neighbors and finish school at home. When they changed their minds about the trip there was no explanation or special meal. Weeks had gone by and no suitcases appeared in the hall, so their children had decided they must be staying.

He heard a knock on the window behind him. There was his father, leaning his forehead on the glass, his mouth moving silently. David banged and pulled the wooden frame until it scraped up a few inches.

“Come on out.”

“I’m watching sausages.”

“Sausages don’t need watching. Come out.”

David turned the heat down under the pan and went through the back porch to the stone patio, where his dad waited.

“I want to show you something.”

“A catfish?”

“No, no, no. There aren’t any catfish in this river. If there were I’d have caught one by now.” He strode toward the three-car garage, stopping by the door farthest to the right, the one that led to his workshop. “This is much better than a catfish.”

David helped lug the door up. “You and mom are being kind of mysterious.”

His father went to a workbench against the rear wall and turned around holding something dull and gray. It was narrow and about four feet long.

“You’ve started a new model?”

“A helicopter. For you.”

“Dad!” It was a remote-control helicopter for collecting upper-level weather data. Richard had already made a plane for the same purpose that David used every week.

“Thought something that went straight up would be useful when you’re operating from the top of your building.”

“For sure. That’s great. It’s going to be a beauty!”

Miranda’s voice came from behind them. “I knew those sausages would be left to their own devices!”

She didn’t seem to mind. The look on her face reminded David of Christmas morning. She loved secrets, and she loved revealing them.

“What’s going on, Mom?”

Her smile widened, and was quickly suppressed. She began to lead the way back to the house but before they reached it the back door opened and a pajama-clad figure came out, yawning.

“Sam!”

He was thin, and his face tight with strain. But home, weeks before expected. David felt himself grinning. He opened his arms for a back-thumping hug.

THE BRETTON FAMILY got together for two weeks every year. The date varied depending on when Sam had leave, but they tried for Christmas at The Castle or summer at the cottage. This year it was supposed to be the cottage, in early August. After the initial pleasure of seeing his brother, David realized having him turn up before his scheduled break was unlikely to be a good thing. Sam didn’t offer an explanation, though, so David didn’t ask for one.

They had breakfast on the porch with Richard still talking about the remote-control helicopter and Miranda continually touching Sam as if checking that he was really there. When the meal was done she insisted “the boys” go outside rather than help with the dishes. They compromised by clearing the table then strolled down to the river, Sam still in his pajamas, bare feet stuck into a pair of olive green rubber boots left by the door.

“This place never changes,” he said. “That’s kind of nice and kind of creepy.”

“The Yard Time Forgot.” It wasn’t so much time’s fault. It was David and his dad not getting around to mowing and pruning often enough. The whole yard was overgrown, but especially where it met the river. They’d always left it a bit wild there—even before the word ecosystem had found its way into everyday conversation. Some people had parklike yards. This one was more of a storybook forest, with unexpected benches and flowers wherever Miranda decided to tuck them.

Sam kicked at the twisted shrubs and mounded grasses.

“I’ll bet we’ve got skunks.”

“And in case we do, you’re trying to annoy them?”

The absentminded kicking stopped. Sam bent over, tugging at the grass purposefully. “Look at this!”

David went closer. Lying upside down under a tangle of grass was their old cedar-and-canvas canoe.

Muttering his annoyance, Sam kept clearing away vegetation. “Out in the weather like this? Didn’t we leave it in the garage?”

“Someone must have brought it down to use.”

“Sarah!”

“Well—”

“Sarah for sure, and some guy. She’d get excited, oh my, such a romantic outing, and then she’d forget all about it.” Sam knocked on the hull. “What do you think?”

“It looks fairly solid, considering. Not past repair.”

Sam lifted one side and peered underneath. “The paddles are here.” He pulled one out. It had a rounded, beaver-tail design and only reached to his chest, just right for when he was a child. A daddy longlegs ran off the weathered wood and fell into the grass. “I’m going to have to talk to that girl.”

“Talking’s never been that useful.” From birth Sarah had been impervious to her brothers’ view of things. The canoe had been a regular source of conflict. Sarah would insist on going with them whenever they took it out on the river, but then she’d free any minnows or crayfish they caught and refuse to do her share of the paddling because it interfered with being the Lady of Shalott.

David thought Sam would want to spend a few days cleaning the canoe, patching it, maybe giving the cedar a fresh coat of marine varnish and the canvas some waterproof paint—or at least stick on some duct tape here and there—but he was already pushing it into the water.

“Are you going to help?”

“You’re doing fine, Sam.”

“You can pull it in, then.”

“The sweaty stuff’s up to you. I have to be at work in an hour.” But something got to him while he watched his brother struggle with the heavy craft. The squish of river mud or the smell of the water, he didn’t know. He kicked off his shoes and tugged off his socks, then stooped to roll up his pant legs. By then the canoe was floating. Sam knelt in the stern, his paddle hard against the riverbed.

“You’re going to get wet.”

David had already noticed that. He took a giant step from the muddy shore, one foot slipping as he heaved himself into the canoe. It rocked and he nearly tipped them both into the river.

“Idiot!” Half laughing, Sam grabbed David’s belt and pulled him down. “Never stand, remember?”

“Oh, right. It’s a gondola you stand up in.”

They didn’t have life jackets. David always used one in his own canoe, but as close as they were to the river, his parents had never owned any. The Bretton kids had grown up with the feeling that danger didn’t lurk anywhere. They were never told to be careful, never watched, never scolded for taking risks. Looking back, David thought they must have been just plain lucky.

“Better stay close to shore,” he said.

Sam ignored him. With his paddle acting as rudder he was in control of where they went, and he steered them to the middle of the river. David didn’t push the point. There was a brittleness about Sam, as if he’d be glad of a chance to push back. It was enough to feel muscles pulling, hear the dip of the paddles and know his brother was safe at home. A kayak passed them and a mother mallard led a line of fluff balls away from them into the reeds, but other than that they were alone.

Here and there dampness seeped through the canvas. “Have we got anything to bail with, Sam? If we need to, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“I don’t want much of this river in here with us.”

Sam didn’t answer. Maybe he’d forgotten about the variety of unpleasant things that were dumped into the Red. The water could cause a rash were it touched skin, or cramps in anyone unfortunate enough to ingest it.

“Is this your leave instead of August? We should tell Sarah to come now if she can.”

“Don’t bother.”

“But you’ll want to see her.”

“Not really.”

David wasn’t sure what to make of his brother’s tone. He didn’t sound angry, but he wasn’t joking around, either.

“Sam.”

“What?”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“It’s just a canoe.”

“It’s not just a canoe. It’s our canoe.”

They were out of the slow-moving loop. The farther they went the harder the paddle back would be and he’d arrive at work sweaty after all. Unless the steady seeping became leaking and they sank. Swimming to shore through this brown soup would be one way of solving the sweaty problem.

“It’s good you came home early, Sam. Mom and Dad missed you.”

“They’re all right, aren’t they? Sarah’s not driving them crazy?”

“Sarah’s not the problem, not for Mom and Dad, anyway.”

“So there is a problem? I thought there was.”

“It’s nothing serious. Dad’s bothered about the big 7-0.” It wasn’t the age, his father had told him, not the nearly three-quarters of a century behind him. Feeling like a wise old man was fine. The problem was he wanted to keep on being one for another three-quarters of a century.

The canoe had slowed. David looked over his shoulder. Sam wasn’t moving. He stared at the riverbank, his face unguarded, exhaustion in every line.

“Sam?”

“I thought it would be…like it usually is. Greener.”

“The trees are stressed. One year there’s flooding, the next it’s dry. We’ve had thaws in January. It’s not what they need.” David angled his paddle, pushing away from the current as best he could from the bow. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” Sam began to turn the canoe around.

TO CHRIS, nice clothes meant matching. He came to breakfast wearing blue jeans and a blue T-shirt, and when it was time to leave he added a blue baseball cap. Although he seemed a little wound up about what he might learn at the museum, Gwyn thought he was happy to be going.

She set the pace, fast enough for them to reach the stop before the bus, but slow enough to accommodate Chris’s frequent pausing and squatting to watch ants drag dead bugs across the cement, bumblebees bounce from clover flower to clover flower and caterpillars invite almost certain death on the slow crawl from boulevard to nearby lawn.

“Caterpillars are sort of like snakes,” he said.

Gwyn took his hand and hurried across the road just before the light changed. “How are caterpillars like snakes?”

“Same kind of bodies.”

“Long and squiggly?”

“Yeah. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then there’s larva. Same type of body, too.”

He talked about animal bodies all the way to the museum. Shapes of snouts, lengths of necks, reasons for tails. When Gwyn stopped to put the change from the admission in her purse he hurried ahead into the galleries. She caught up with him watching a video about the Earth’s changing tectonic plates. A male voice narrated while colored jigsaw pieces floated around two attached blue ovals, finally taking the shape of a modern map of the world. When the video ended Chris pushed a button and watched the whole thing again.

“So-o,” he said. “Things used to be different. All the land in the world was in one place.”

“A supercontinent.”

“I kind of thought it was more, you know…”

“Nailed down?”

She was trying to lighten the mood, but he nodded seriously. “I don’t really like that idea, Mom. What if it’s still doing it?”

“Still moving? I don’t think so. Not enough to make a difference to us, anyway. Not enough to make the trip to Australia any shorter.”

He gave her a look she would have called world-weary in an older person.

“It is a strange idea. You expect the ground under your feet to stay in one place.”

“Right.” He seemed more satisfied with that response. “All the time, too.”

“Because it’s not a boat. It’s a continent.”

That got a smile. He led the way around the corner and found what he’d come for: a floor-to-ceiling painting of a woolly mammoth.

Gwyn skimmed the small box of text provided. “It doesn’t say anything about your mammoth, Chris. Just about mammoths in general. They lived until around ten thousand years ago, at the time of the last ice age, and then they became extinct. They had long shaggy hair and long curving tusks. Several complete specimens have been found.”

“Does it say anything about grass?”

“Not a thing.”

Chris frowned with concentration while he tried to sound out the text for himself. He was doing fine at home with Dr. Seuss, but whoever wrote the museum’s plaques wasn’t into helpful rhyming.

“I’m not sure where to look next, sweetheart. Maybe the library.”

“Can I be of any help?”

A man stood a few feet away. Gwyn got the feeling he’d been there for a while. He was tall and dark, with an air of quiet authority. How he pulled that off in casual clothes with his pant legs damp and wrinkled below the knee, she didn’t know. A name tag hung from a long string, like a shoelace, around his neck. She got as far as David, then found she didn’t want to look at his chest long enough to read the rest. His eyes were dark brown, coffee brown. It was hard to meet them, but hard to look away, too.

He took care of that, turning to smile at Chris. “Did you want to know something about mammoths?”

After all the museum employees Chris had happily questioned on other visits, older fatherly ones and young motherly ones and gangly brotherly ones, he chose this moment to remember not to speak to strangers, not even strangers with name tags. Gwyn looked at the man’s collar instead of his warm, dark eyes and explained about the movie and the mammoth.

He nodded, with some enthusiasm. “I know the specimen you mean. A number of surprisingly well-preserved mammoths have been found. I’ve heard that the scientists who dug up one of them actually cooked themselves a few steaks.”

Gwyn’s stomach lurched at the thought.

“Eew,” Chris said. There was nothing like a disgusting thought to dispel shyness. “But the one in the movie, with grass in its mouth, do you know about that one?”

“Sure. Grass and buttercups in its mouth and stomach. Not digested yet, which led some people to conclude it might have died and frozen very quickly. Is that the part that got your attention?”

“Yeah. Like, in the movie, cold air froze people solid as soon as it touched them.”

“That was strange, wasn’t it? Pretty unbelievable, too. I don’t think that’s what happened to the mammoth. One possibility is that it fell into a crack in a glacier.”

That was what Gwyn had expected from the museum, a comforting dose of reality. “So it’s not a sign that an ice age erupted out of nowhere while the mammoth was eating?” She wanted to make that completely clear to Chris. “It’s not suggesting there’s going to be a sudden change in our climate?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Her neck muscles tightened.

“A change in the climate is happening.” He glanced at Chris then looked back at Gwyn, apparently deciding she was his target audience. “It’s complicated and there’s still disagreement about the details. Whether or not the Earth could experience another ice age is difficult to say. If it did, it would be a response to excessive warming.”

She should have left well enough alone. The mammoth had fallen into a crevasse, end of story.

“Warming?” Chris asked. “You get ice from warming?”

“We have a video that explains how that works. If you like I can take you over to watch it.”

“Not today,” Gwyn said quickly.

The man glanced at Chris again. “I’d say a true ice age is unlikely. It’s speculation at this point. Some changes we can observe and measure, though. The planet’s temperature is increasing. So is the level of carbon dioxide in the oceans. The polar ice caps and all the world’s glaciers are melting. Permafrost is thawing. We’re seeing more extreme weather events—like the hurricane that’s pounding the Caribbean today.”

How could he talk that way in front of a little boy? Chris had drawn closer to Gwyn’s side. She took his hand in hers and smiled, trying to communicate all her confidence and none of her anger. “He’s guessing, hon. That’s what scientific people do. They make hypotheses and then they disprove them.”

She thanked the man for his time and started away from the painting. She would emphasize part of what he’d said and hope Chris wouldn’t worry too much about the rest. The message was that weather was a complicated thing to understand, but scientists thought a new ice age was unlikely. That was the main point. Not a very reassuring main point, but it would have to do.

DAVID HAD OFTEN SEEN the woman and child around the museum. They came maybe once a month, the boy eager, the mother patient, the two of them a perfect example of why he did this work.

And now he’d scared them off. She’d asked the question, hadn’t she? How was he supposed to know she didn’t want an answer? When he’d started to explain her smile had frozen as fast as that mammoth and she’d looked at him as if he’d committed a hit-and-run or something.

He didn’t have any reason to feel guilty. “Ma’am?” That sounded all wrong. Ma’am didn’t suit her.

Their rush out the door slowed, then stopped. She directed the boy to a cutaway view of hibernating insects and rodents before rejoining him.

“If you were going to apologize, it isn’t necessary. You were trying to do your job. My son will be fine.”

“I wasn’t going to apologize.”

That ticked her off. “What did you want, then?”

Her phone number, for one thing. The thought came out of nowhere. He had no business wanting her phone number. “The gift shop has a very good book about the mammoth, if you’re interested. Pictures. Maps. Discussion.”

“Does it? Thank you.”

A dismissive smile and she was on her way. She had no intention of going anywhere near the book. Why did she bring the boy to the museum so often if she didn’t want him to understand how the world worked?

They trailed out of the room, the boy speaking in an anxious tone that made it impossible for David to continue feeling guiltless. He’d drawn some conclusions from his brief look at the hibernation display.

“Mom, if we got buried in snow I guess we’d be all right. Because bees and mice and gophers are all right deep down in the snow.”

“There won’t be an ice age, Chris. That’s what the man said. We won’t be buried in snow. Not ever.”

She was good at conveying a mother’s certainty. What she didn’t seem to realize was that her son had grown beyond being helped by it.

THE BOOK David Whoever had recommended was displayed near the front of the gift shop, all one hundred glossy pages of it, with unnecessarily detailed and colorful photos of the frozen animal and its stomach contents. Hard cover. Forty-eight bucks. Gwyn flipped through it, trying to decide if it would be forty-eight dollars well spent, or just an invitation to sleepless nights for Chris.

“Can we go home, Mom?”

Gwyn looked at him with concern. He liked the gift shop almost as much as the museum itself. Since the store’s glow-in-the-dark star charts had first held his attention when he was two she’d found most of his birthday and Christmas presents here. “Sure we can. Don’t you want to get lunch in the cafeteria first?”

He shrugged.

“Just home?”

His shoulders came up again. He looked miserable. Gwyn led him out of the gift shop, wishing that David person could see what he’d done. Chris had nothing to say on the ride home, only showing a spark of interest when she whispered in his ear, “How about Johansson’s?”

They rode a couple of blocks past their usual stop, and got off near a small brick building on the river side of the street. Johansson’s Fine Foods carried gourmet treats, locally grown produce and homemade take-out meals for when people had no time to cook. It had its own small bakery, too, where it made the richest desserts Gwyn had ever tasted. It was a place for special occasions or emergency spirit lifting.

As she’d hoped, the display case of chocolates got Chris’s attention. He considered a dark chocolate car, a milk chocolate hammer and a hazelnut hedgehog, then settled on the one she’d suspected he would, a six-inch-high hollow tyrannosaurus that cost as much as a restaurant lunch.

“Do we want anything else? Oysters?” His head shaking and face screwing increased as she went on, “Snails? Squid?” She looked around the store, hoping to keep going until he laughed. “Parsnips? Fennel bulbs? Oh—”

Strawberries. Tiers of strawberries in pint containers. Picked that morning, the sign said. No pesticides. They were small, lusciously red and smelled sweeter than any berries Gwyn had seen in her entire life. They hardly cost less than the dinosaur chocolate, but she put a pint on the counter anyway, along with two bottles of a fizzy orange drink from Italy that she’d tried before and loved.

“We’d better stop there. My purse is empty.”

Chris looked up from his chocolate, his gaze sharp. Gwyn wished she hadn’t said anything about money.

“Don’t worry. There’s more in the bank. And even more waiting for me at work.”

Outside, pansies grew in window boxes and there were a few round tables by the sidewalk. Gwyn picked a spot partly shaded by a boulevard tree and put the berries in the middle of the table. With all those seeds and hollows she usually scrubbed berries until they were almost jam, but she put her faith in the no pesticides claim. She picked the one on the very top and popped the whole thing in her mouth. Biting into it was a revelation. It was like taking a drink. She couldn’t believe how fresh, how sweet, how juicy the berry was. She looked at Chris, his feet swinging slowly, a faraway expression on his face.

“You’ve got to have a strawberry, Chris.”

Still holding his dinosaur in his right hand, he took a berry with his left. “Mmm.” He took another.

“That’s the taste of sunshine,” she told him.

He frowned. Space was one of his favorite things, and he took it seriously. “The sun is made of gas.” He watched her for a moment, looking ready to argue if she had anything else silly to say. She confined herself to eating berries, and his attention drifted.

Hers did, too. Back to the damp-legged man at the museum. He must be new. She didn’t remember seeing him before, and she couldn’t have seen him and forgotten. It was years since she’d noticed a man, noticed in a way that made looking at his chest to read his name tag uncomfortable. That kind of feeling—the sudden awareness, the catch in the throat—she had thought belonged only to Duncan.

Of course Duncan had noticed her at the same time. He’d given her a slow smile that started small and got bigger until his eyes sparkled. That was it for her, she was a goner. David Whoever, on the other hand, had chosen to talk about mammoth steaks.

Chris was still playing with his dinosaur. He walked it along the table, leaving tiny chocolate footprints on the plastic. It sniffed the berries, and growled, then picked a fight with a paper napkin. Maybe he hadn’t found the museum visit as upsetting as it had seemed. He looked like her pre–Day After Tomorrow Chris, all about animals and space. Thanks to the strawberries and the filtered sunlight she felt more cheerful herself.

“That dinosaur’s headed for extinction,” she said when she noticed the footprints getting bigger and stickier. “You’d better eat it while you can.”

Chris bit off its head. He chewed and swallowed, then licked his fingers.

“Well,” he said slowly, after finishing another mouthful, and from his preoccupied tone she knew he hadn’t been thinking about dinosaurs after all, “people live way up north where it’s always winter.”

She had to remind herself not to mention elves or toy shops. “The Inuit.”

“In igloos.”

“I don’t think they live in igloos anymore.”

“But they did. So we could keep warm and get food even if our house was ice.”

She’d never seen so much uncertainty in his eyes. “We can do anything we have to do, sweetheart. But our house will never be ice.” She put the remaining strawberries and drinks back in the shopping bag and handed Chris a napkin to rub the melted chocolate from his hands.

On the way home he went back to telling her the plot of The Day After Tomorrow. She listened more to his voice than to the story. It was higher pitched than usual and every sentence finished with an uncertain upswing, an unasked question. Maybe it would help if they spent the afternoon reading fairy tales. “The Little Mermaid,” “Hansel and Gretel.” He’d heard those often enough without believing they were true. Or maybe a complete change of pace would be better. They could go to the park and try to skip stones on the river.

“That man was a scientist, right?”

She saw the pitfall immediately. “The one who talked to us at the museum? I don’t know what he does there.”

“The actor wasn’t a scientist and the screenwriter wasn’t a scientist but the man we talked to today, he was a scientist.”

“We don’t know,” she repeated. “All kinds of people work there. Even artists, to make the displays. And accountants to work on the budget.”

Chris gave her another of those looks. She didn’t blame him. David Whoever hadn’t sounded like an artist or an accountant. She tried to think of something more convincing. “And tour guides.”

“And scientists, I bet.”

She had to agree. Scientists definitely worked at the museum. Distracting Chris with stories and outings wasn’t going to work.

CHAPTER THREE

TWELVE-THIRTY, and Chris wasn’t ready for school. Wearing only Spider-Man briefs, he stood on top of a brand-new shirt in the middle of his bedroom. A narrow line of red trickled down his heel.

He looked at Gwyn guiltily. “I’m bleeding.”

It was almost a week since their visit to the museum and Gwyn was still wishing they hadn’t gone. She’d tried to keep Chris’s days low-key. They’d walked along the river, curled up on the sofa reading and played games like Snakes and Ladders, but nothing had kept his attention from the idea of an impending ice age.

The point he’d fixated on was that the frozen mammoth from the movie was real. If it was real then maybe other parts of the story were, too. Like the field of ice that collapsed under one of the “scientists,” like glaciers melting and filling the oceans with too much fresh water. If he wasn’t miserable enough trying to get his five-year-old head around those questions, Mrs. Henderson—following Gwyn’s instructions—had encouraged him to play outside a couple of evenings ago, but she had ignored the bottle of mosquito repellent kept by the door. Chris was covered with bites.

He had been cantankerous all morning, scratching fiercely and challenging Gwyn at every opportunity. After falling asleep in the rocker on the porch she wasn’t in the best of shape herself. At five-thirty she’d woken to crickets so loud she couldn’t believe there wasn’t a bylaw against them and a monster kink in her neck that no amount of massaging had fixed.

Holding his foot away from her clothes she carried Chris to the bathroom. “You said you weren’t going to scratch those bites.”

“They got itchy.”

“Why didn’t you call me? I could have got the calamine lotion for you.”

“I hate that stuff!”

“You sound mad at me. I didn’t bite you.”

He was in no mood to smile. Gwyn sat him on the narrow vanity with his foot in the sink. Cool running water diluted the trail of blood, then washed it away. She dabbed peroxide on the spots of broken skin and stuck on a web of Band-Aids.

“We’re going to be late.”

Chris was silent. If he missed the second bell he’d have to take a note from the teacher to the principal’s office. After a moment he said, “I didn’t get blood on the carpet.”

It would have been nice if he’d kept it off his new shirt, too. “You did your best, right?” They nodded at each other. “Off you go. Get dressed as fast as you can.”

While she waited she kept checking her watch, as if that would help her get to the bus on time. Sooner than she expected Chris came to the door, dragging his backpack behind him. He wore a long-sleeved button-up shirt that looked silly with his shorts.

She hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding her keys. “Go back and change into a T-shirt, Chris.” He didn’t move so she added, “You know, short sleeves, over the head?”

“I like this shirt.”

“That one goes with long pants. You might get teased at recess.”

“I don’t care.”

Gwyn put her head to one side and stared at him. He stared back, unblinking. He was younger and smaller than most of the boys in his class, more verbal, and not the least bit interested in sports, unless chess counted. Not that he could play it, yet. He just trotted the knights across the squares and had the bishops confer with the king and queen. The other kindergarteners weren’t exactly tough guys, either, but what would happen next year, or a few years from now?

“Chris, do as I say.”

He sighed, and trailed back to his room. She heard drawers scraping back and forth, then he returned wearing a T-shirt that looked as if it belonged in the laundry hamper. The mood he was in, maybe he had got it from the hamper.

“Let’s go. Quick as you can.”

That turned out not to be very quick. Every few steps Chris slowed down to scrape his sandaled foot against his ankle, or rub his hand over a swollen bite on his arm. He began to scratch it, absentmindedly at first, then angrily.

“Don’t, hon.”

“I have to.” Still scratching, he stopped walking so he could look up at the sky, turning in circles to see all around. “Shouldn’t there be some clouds? There’s usually clouds.”

“We don’t have time to talk about the weather, Chris.”

“But shouldn’t—”

“Chris!”

Minutes after the last bell, they arrived at the school’s front entrance. She watched him go through, looking grumpy even from the back. The sight made her ache. Wasn’t five supposed to be a happy age?

“IT’S FUNGUS,” said the woman in the first bed. “That’s what I heard. You slap ’em and you drive this fungus they carry right into your bloodstream. Like a poison dart. And that’s it. There’s nothing anybody can do for you.”

Gwyn stood holding a lunch tray and wishing she hadn’t mentioned Chris’s discomfort. She’d arrived at the hospital half an hour late, overheated and flustered from hurrying, and found herself explaining why to everyone she saw.

“You don’t even need fungus,” the woman’s roommate added. “Any old infection will do the job. My cousin had a mosquito bite that he would not leave alone. Next thing we know a red line goes snaking up his arm from the bite. And it just keeps going. Up to his elbow. Up to his shoulder. It gets to his heart and—” she slapped her hands together sharply “—that was it. He keeled over right in front of me.” She nodded at Gwyn. “But don’t you worry about your boy. Things are different now.”

“You want to put oatmeal in his bath,” the first woman advised. “That’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Maybe an antibiotic cream would be a good idea, too.

She slid the tray into place on the meal cart and went into the next room. A smiling, fully dressed man sat in the armchair beside an empty bed.

“There you are!” he said. “All the nurses were worried about you.”

“You’re exaggerating, Mr. Scott.”

“Having trouble with your son?”

Gwyn wished she could tell him about Chris’s ice age fears. It wasn’t that Mr. Scott knew about science. He’d worked in the Grill Room bakery at Eaton’s from his high school graduation until the store closed. It wasn’t even that he knew about children. He and his wife didn’t have a family. Maybe she just wanted to complain to someone about David Whoever. She couldn’t use a senior citizen with a heart condition for that.

“We live near the river so we have lots of mosquitoes,” she said. “Poor kid’s one big bite.”

“I remember what that was like.” Mr. Scott sounded nostalgic. “You get out with your chums and you don’t even notice the darn things until you’re home and want to go to sleep. My mother used to soak cloths in baking soda and water and spread them on my skin. Cool water, that’s the ticket.”

“I’ll try it. Thanks.” Gwyn picked up her lunch tray. “All ready to go?”

“Yup, they’re cutting me loose. I’ll miss you.”

“I bet you won’t.” A bowl of pudding sat untouched beside his plate. “Want to keep that for later? You never know how long you’ll wait to get signed out.”

“They won’t let me.”

It was true the kitchen liked having all the dishes returned at the same time. Mr. Scott’s diet didn’t allow many treats, though. Gwyn left the bowl and spoon on his over-bed table, put a finger to her lips and carried his tray out of the room.

In the corridor she almost barreled into the head nurse. Mrs. Byrd always looked stern, whether or not she was feeling that way, so it alarmed anyone with a guilty conscience to find her on their heels. It was just once, Gwyn thought, just half an hour.

“Trouble at home today?”

“I’m sorry. We took too long getting ourselves organized.”

“Could you have called?”

It had seemed like one more thing to do, a few more minutes between herself and the bus. “I guess I hoped to get here on time.”

Mrs. Byrd still looked stern, but not necessarily disapproving. Gwyn felt a familiar anxiety, an eagerness to please that made her feel eight years old. For years, with the School of Nursing’s traditional pleated cap on her head, its gold pin over her breast and the hospital’s crest on her sleeve Mrs. Byrd had been the closest thing to her mother Gwyn could see. It gave her feelings of fondness for the woman that made no sense otherwise.

“I’ll need you to make up the half hour you missed. There’s plenty for you to do after your regular work. You can read to Mrs. Wilton and the shelves in the supply room should be straightened up.” Mrs. Byrd walked away without waiting for an answer.

Gwyn rolled her head back and forth and dug her fingertips into the knotted muscle in her neck. She wouldn’t be home before Chris and this was Mrs. Henderson’s afternoon for aquacize. During her coffee break she’d need to make some calls.

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE rules that everything happened all at once in hospitals. Just as Gwyn was about to leave the ward Mr. Scott was discharged, three patients were admitted and another went into respiratory arrest. In between helping people into gowns and rushing samples to the lab she called the kindergarten mom who had agreed to pick up Chris, found out she was about to leave for a soccer game and, now that Iris was back from work, arranged for him to go there instead.

Almost two hours late she finally got home. There was no fence between her yard and Iris’s so as soon as Gwyn walked up her sidewalk she saw Chris and Molly playing. They lay on the grass reaching for each other, right arms outstretched, fingertips barely touching. Chris clutched long cardboard rolls under his left arm. When she got closer she heard them half gasping, half shouting.

“I’ve got you!” Molly said desperately.

“Take the samples!”

“Throw them here!”

“Ahhh!” Chris rolled away, his voice fading, the cardboard tubes flying into the air.

Iris appeared at the door. “Long day? Come have a cold drink.”

“I’m so sorry about this. Thanks for looking out for Chris.” Gwyn followed Iris inside. When she looked out the kitchen window the children were on their stomachs again, but their roles were reversed.

Iris handed her a glass of lemonade. “They’re playing The Day After Tomorrow.”

“Shoot.” The mild word didn’t feel like enough to say. She repeated it, with feeling.

Iris took a cigarette from a nearly full box. “The ground is cracking apart, they tell me, and they take turns being the guy with the ice core samples who’s about to fall to his death.”

Maybe acting it out was a good thing. Chris could make it a game. He seemed happier now than he had trudging into school.

“Don’t look so worried. Didn’t you ever play Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?”

Gwyn smiled, feeling a little sheepish and nostalgic. “National Velvet. I trotted everywhere and jumped over things.”

“Now that’s a picture I’m going to hang on to.”

“But our kids are playing The End of the World.”

“No, no,” Iris said lightly. “Just the end of the world as we know it.” She lit her cigarette, smelled the smoke appreciatively, then put it out.

“Think I should quit my job?”

“No, I don’t. What brought that on?”

She only worked part-time. Maybe subtracting her small paycheck wouldn’t make all that much difference. Then she would be there when Chris needed her, bug spray at the ready. “There’s Duncan’s pension and life insurance. We’d get by.”

“Getting by is all right for a while. You wouldn’t like it in the long run. I can tell you for sure from now until he’s grown up and settled into his own job you’ll always need more cash.”

Iris would know. She had longer experience than Gwyn at raising a child alone. There wasn’t an ex-husband in the wings, no child support check, no pension. An aunt who lived on a farm not far from the city helped out with fresh produce and a place for free holidays, but that was all.

“How do you do it, Iris?”

“Do what?”

“Work full-time, take care of the house, raise Molly.”

Iris shrugged. “Badly?”

Gwyn gave a snort. “You’d better not do it badly. You’re my role model.”

“Uh-oh.” They both smiled, then Iris added, “You can’t fix everything for him. It wouldn’t be good for him even if you tried.”

Gwyn nodded. The urge to make everything better was there, though, along with the terrible feeling of falling short when she saw him struggle. Next year he’d be in school morning and afternoon. That would help, but it brought its own worries. School could be an uncaring place to leave a child for so many hours of the day.

She watched Chris pull Molly back from the imagined precipice again. “He was calming down until he saw the hurricane coverage yesterday. The weather channel should come with an R rating.” After churning over the tip of Florida Elton had gathered strength before hitting the coast of Mexico. Their TV screen had been full of shattered houses and drowned livestock.

An idea struck her and she turned back to Iris. “How old is Molly?”

“Twelve, why?”

“I thought she was about ten.” Ten forever.

“Ten would be fine. That was a good year. The next one I’m looking forward to is, I don’t know, twenty-five?”

It was a spur-of-the-moment idea. She should probably wait and think it through, but it seemed like a perfect solution. A pretty good solution, at least. “Would you mind if I offered her a summer job?”

Iris looked at Gwyn blankly for a second, then started shaking her head. “Oh, no.”

“No?”

“You need someone reliable. A grandmother. Remember?”

“This is the happiest Chris has been for days.”

“I don’t know.” Iris’s head was still going back and forth. “It’s up to you, I guess.”

That seemed to be as close as she was going to get to permission. Gwyn hurried outside, Iris right behind her. The kids stopped playing when they saw their parents. Chris lay on his back, cardboard rolls held to his stomach.

“We saved the ice core samples, Mom.”

“I noticed, well done. How’s the bite?” She meant the one on his forearm. It had been giving him the most trouble.

“Good.”

“Let’s see.” A scab had started to form over the top, so at least she knew he’d stopped scratching. A large area around the bite was pink, swollen and warm to touch. “I bought some ointment that’s going to help it feel better.”

Chris pulled his arm away. “I hate ointment.”

She turned to his fellow scientist. “Your mom told me you’re twelve.”

Molly dropped her cardboard roll, discarding all appearance of childhood as she rose from the ground. “Nearly thirteen.”

“Twelve,” Iris said firmly.

“Not for long.”

“You’re twelve, and you’ll be twelve for another four months.”

Gwyn sidestepped the brewing squabble. “Are you interested in having a summer job? I need a babysitter who’s willing to play with Chris, someone who’ll remember bug spray and sunscreen. It would be about twenty hours a week, for July and August. Usually five hours at a time, sometimes more like nine. And if that worked for all of us, in the fall we could talk about evenings.”

“I’d love to do it! I can start right now.”

“You can start after exams,” Iris said.

“Next week, then. How much would I make, Mrs. Sinclair?”

“Molly! She’ll do it as a favor, Gwyn. What are neighbors for?”

“I’m paying five dollars an hour now.”

“No way, no way.” Iris reached into her pocket for her cigarettes again. “She doesn’t need five dollars an hour. If you insist on paying her, pay her something reasonable. Two dollars. That’s plenty.”

“Five times twenty,” Molly said softly. She got a faraway look while she did the math. “That’s… that’s eighty dollars a week! Oh, I’m so going shopping.” She gave a little jump. “I can get a new dress for the year-end dance!”

“You see why I want her to study? It’s one hundred dollars, Molly. Five times two and move the decimal, for heaven’s sake.” Iris tapped Gwyn’s arm. “Four dollars, and that’s final.”

Gwyn tried not to listen to Molly and Iris negotiating how much Molly should be paid and whether she should get a bank account and how much she should put away for her education. She hoped this was a good idea. As hard as it was going to be to call Mrs. Henderson with the news, it would be even harder to make the same kind of call to Molly.

AFTER WASHING DIRT from Chris’s bites and applying a first dose of antibiotic ointment Gwyn took store-bought salad and a ready-cooked chicken from the fridge and arranged them on the table, moving aside all the cardboard ice core samples he’d brought with him.

“Is Molly instead of Mrs. Henderson?” he asked as he pulled out his chair and climbed onto it. “Or would Mrs. Henderson still come sometimes?”

“Instead of.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“I don’t like Mrs. Henderson.”

“You never told me that before. Why don’t you like her?”

He shrugged, lifting far more lettuce onto his plate than he would ever eat. Gwyn watched, thinking about nanny cams and horror stories she’d read in the paper. She repeated, “Why don’t you like Mrs. Henderson?”

“She’s grumpy.”

Gwyn couldn’t deny that. “Grumpy, how?”

He started putting some of the lettuce back in the salad bowl.

“You can’t do that, Chris. Go ahead for now, but in general you can’t. Once you touch food you have to keep it. Grumpy like yelling? Spanking?”

“Like I better stay out of the way. Can I have a drumstick?”

She turned the plate so the drumstick was in easy reach. Grumpy like he’d better stay out of the way? A child in his own home feeling in the way. She should have realized. She had realized. She should have acted sooner.

“Chris, I wish we didn’t need a babysitter, but we do for now. So after this will you promise to tell me if there’s ever a problem? If the sitter’s grumpy—let’s say grumpier than I am—or keeps the TV on all the time or makes you feel like you’d better stay out of her way. Will you tell me?”

“Okay. Mom, don’t you think there’d be worms in those mammoth steaks?”

“Chris!” Her sharp tone startled both of them. “Not while we’re eating. I mean it.” He’d been talking about the mammoth all week, now with the added detail about the buttercups and the ten-thousand-year-old steak dinner. She was tired of hearing about the mammoth and she was especially tired of hearing about its meat.

He stared silently at his plate and used a pointy carrot stick to poke at a tomato wedge. “Ms. Gibson says I don’t need to know about climate change yet.”

“I agree.” Scientists could argue about whether or not the climate was changing all they liked, but little children shouldn’t have to think about it.

“That’s what she calls it. Climate change. Plenty of time for that in high school, she says.”

Chris heard that a lot, whenever he wanted to know things like why humans couldn’t get to Mars or whether bacteria felt it when you took antibiotics. It was one of the drawbacks of kindergarten.

“And what did you think of that answer?”

“Well, I’m kind of wondering about it now.”

“Maybe you weren’t doing the lesson she gave you.”

Chris jabbed the tomato again.

“Ah-hah.”

“It was folk dancing.”

“Not your favorite thing.”

“Not my anything!” His carrot broke, sending the tomato wedge across his plate. “She wants to see you.”

Gwyn stopped eating. “Did she say why?”

“Nope.” He stood up and dug around in his pockets, then handed Gwyn a crumpled envelope. She slipped a finger under the flap and tore. The paper had been folded neatly to begin with, but Chris’s pocket had added lots of wrinkles.

Dear Mrs. Sinclair,

Do you have time for a quick chat tomorrow? Before school, during recess in the morning or afternoon, at lunch hour or after school all work for me. Please call.

Five options. The only way Ms. Gibson could have made a parent-teacher meeting sound more urgent would have been to show up on the doorstep. Gwyn was off work the next day, so any of the times would suit her. She could walk to school with Chris and meet with the teacher before afternoon classes.

“Does she say why in there?” Chris asked.

“Not even a hint.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong. Least I don’t think so. Other than not dancing. Elliott danced but he kept kicking Drew on purpose. That’s worse, isn’t it?”

“Maybe she wants to tell me about something you did right.”

Chris looked surprised at the possibility. “I don’t think I did anything right, either.”

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