Chapter 9: Roadkill

School let out Friday at noon, and by nine o’clock Saturday morning Maggie had arranged herself on the porch steps in a posture that announced she had nowhere to be for seventy days and intended to feel every one of them. She was wearing Evan’s flannel with the sleeves shoved up and a pair of cutoffs that had been jeans at Christmas. She had one earbud in and her phone in her lap and Gus’s head under her free hand, and she was working through a bowl of cereal at a speed that suggested the cereal had also been given the summer off.

“Grain run,” Nora said, coming down with her boots in her hand.

“It’s the first day.”

“The hens don’t know that. We’re down to the bottom of the can and Fern’s been eyeing the bag like it owes her money.”

Maggie tipped the bowl and drank the milk, which she was not supposed to do and did every day. “Can I get something at the store?”

“Within reason.”

“That’s a no with extra steps.”

“It’s a within reason.”

They took the back way, out Cold Spring Road past the fork, because the state road would be full of Saturday and because Nora liked the back way. The road ran and curved and ran again, stone walls stitching along the shoulders, the woods leaning close in full leaf now, the wet spots in the low stretches shining where the week’s rain still stood in the ditches. It had rained hard Thursday, a gray soaking day of it, and everything since had the pushed, swollen look of early June, grass gone to seed heads overnight, the ditches loud with runoff, the green so thick it looked like a decision the woods had made all at once.

Nora drove with the window down and ran the week ahead the way she always did, a habit that no longer felt like work. Kitten season was opening; Deb had two boxes of them scheduled for Tuesday and there would be more, there were always more. Blue the husky was statistically overdue for a porcupine; she could have circled a date. The Fournier pup was long healed, last recheck clean, and Donna had sent a picture of him asleep on the couch he was not allowed on, taking up all of it, one ear inside out. Mrs. Trombley’s poodle was due for a dental she would put off until August. Ordinary arithmetic. It added up the way she liked things to add up.

Maggie had the one earbud in and the window cracked and her knees against the dash, narrating nothing, which was its own kind of company.

They came around the long bend past the fork, where the road ran flat between a wet meadow on one side and the woods on the other, and Maggie sat up.

“Snake,” she said.

Nora saw it a half second later, a dark length on the pavement near the center line, and then it was behind them.

Maggie had turned in her seat to watch it go. “Somebody got a snake.”

“Mm.”

“Big one.” She faced front again and put her knees back on the dash. That was the whole of it. She went back to her phone, and Nora drove, and the road did what the road did, and neither of Nora’s hands moved on the wheel, which she noticed, the way you notice you are holding your breath, and then the meadow ended and the woods took over and it was two miles to the state road.

The grain store out past the mill was doing its Saturday business, trucks nosed in at angles, somebody’s border collie asleep on the loading dock in a patch of sun with the profound commitment of a dog that has claimed a spot early. Nora bought layer pellets and goat feed and a mineral block, and Maggie chose, from the rack by the register, a root beer in a glass bottle and a paper sack of penny candy that cost four dollars, and the man at the counter carried nothing and commented on everything, which was his job. Maggie hauled a fifty-pound bag off the cart and into the back of the car in one motion, just to do it, and looked around to see if it had been observed, and Nora made sure to be reading the receipt.