Chapter 23: Ice-Out

The ice went out of the east channel on the fourteenth of April, in the night, with a sound.

By morning the water ran dark and open between the pines, and the air smelled of mud and thaw.

Astrid stood on the bank by the willows with the pine box in her arms, and she had not said a word since sunrise.

I stood a step behind her with the coil of orange rope over my shoulder.

Tom waited by the trees with his hat in his hand, and he had worn his best green parka.

"They're here," he said, and a truck rattled down the track.

A woman climbed out of the cab, tall and freckled, with Mae's wide jaw and Mae's way of slamming a door.

Five dogs boiled out of the truck bed behind her in a storm of fur and noise.

They hit the snow already running, and every one of them made straight for Astrid.

She dropped to her knees in the mud and let them climb her.

A big gray female with one blue eye shoved her whole head under Astrid's chin and whined.

Astrid said, "I know, girl, I know," over and over in a cracked voice.

Mae's sister stood watching with her hands on her hips and her own face wet.

"They looked for you at the door for a month," she said. "I told them you'd come."

"I should have," Astrid said. "I couldn't."

"I know."

The sister crossed the muddy ground and held out an envelope.

"My mother wrote this. She wouldn't come. She said she'd say it wrong."

Astrid took it with a hand that wasn't steady.

She read it standing in the thaw while five dogs leaned on her legs, and I watched her mouth move around the first line.

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