Chapter 4: The Logging Road

Joanna booked me a slot at the county hospital in Missoula for Tuesday at nine.

A stamped scan from a human hospital, with a date and a doctor's name on it. Nobody at the Moon Hall could call that a picture anyone could make.

I left Maud's cottage at six.

She stood on the porch in her nightgown with the shotgun on her arm.

"Take the highway," she said. "Not the logging road."

"The highway adds forty minutes."

"Then leave forty minutes earlier."

"I'm already early, Maud."

She didn't smile. She pressed a thermos of tea into my hands through the car window and held on to my fingers for a second too long.

"Your hands are like ice," she said.

"They always are."

"Mm," said my grandmother. She let go.

My car was an old green hatchback I'd had since college.

It had sat in the Moon Hall lot for two hours the day before, while the elders read me my charges.

I hadn't thought anything of that.

At the bottom of the drive I made the choice I wasn't supposed to make.

The highway was backed up behind a logging truck.

The logging road ran up over the ridge and came down at Missoula's edge, twenty minutes shorter.

I took it.

The sun was only just coming up over the pines. Frost lay thick on the gravel.

I had one hand on the wheel and one on my stomach, and I talked to them the way I'd been doing since Saturday.

"Okay, you four. Hold on. We're almost there."

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