They aren’t our dishes. This gets on our mother’s nerves. If it gets on her nerves enough, she will do the dishes herself, which is intended to be a rebuke. At night we lie in the saggy pull-out bed, head to toe, which is supposed to make us go to sleep sooner, and kick each other silently under the covers; or else we try to see how far we can get our sock feet up each other’s pajama legs. Once in a while the headlights of a passing car show through the window, moving first along one wall, then along the next wall, then fading away. There’s an engine sound, then the sizzle of tires on the wet road. Then silence.

Chapter 6

I don’t know who took that picture of me. It must have been my brother, because my mother is inside the cabin, behind the white door, wearing gray slacks and a dark-blue plaid shirt, packing our food into cardboard boxes and our clothes into suitcases. She has a system for packing; she talks to herself while she’s doing it, reminding herself of details, and she likes us out of the way. Right after the picture it begins to snow, small dry flakes falling singly out of the hard northern November sky. There’s a kind of hush and lassitude until that first snow, with the light waning and the last moose-maple leaves dangling from the branches like seaweed. We felt sleepy until it began to snow. Now we feel exhilarated.

We’re running around outside the motel, wearing nothing but our worn-out summer shoes, with our bare hands outstretched to the falling snowflakes, our heads thrown back, our mouths open, eating snow. If it were thick on the ground we would roll in it, like dogs in dirt. It fills us with the same kind of rapture. But our mother looks out the window and sees us, and the snow, and makes us come inside and dry our feet off with the skimpy towels. We have no winter boots that fit. While we’re inside, the snow turns to sleet. Our father is pacing the floor, jingling his keys in his pocket.