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didn’t hear. You were reading that recipe for Christmas pudding.”

    “I was?” Rose glanced at a cookbook open on the kitchen table. “Still, you should have called when it got to be so late.”

    “My fault, Rose,” Cork said. “She was helping me with some chores.”

    “Well.” Rose considered Anne a moment more. “Go clean up. Dinner will be ready shortly. And you—” She turned to Cork with a scowl, then smiled. “Would you like to stay? There’s plenty of food.”

    “Where’s Jo?”

    “Down the hall in her office. She’d like to talk with you.”

    “I might not be welcome for dinner after.”

    “You know that’s not true,” Rose said. “Just let me know and I’ll have Jenny set another place.” She turned back to the stove, picked up a wooden spoon, and began stirring something in the saucepan.

    In the living room, Cork found his five-year-old son, Stevie, on his belly playing with Legos. The television was on, tuned to cartoons. Stevie rolled over at his father’s approach and shouted, “Daddy!”

    Cork knelt down. “What’s up, buddy?”

    Stevie held out a Lego creation, something like a house. “Jail,” he said.

    “Good one, too,” Cork told him. “Who’s it for?”

    Stevie’s eyes turned devilish. “You.”

    “
Hmmmm.
Am I the sheriff of this jail?”

    Stevie shook his head.

    “I’m the crook? Well then, let me show you what they put me in for.”

    He wrestled with his son awhile. “You’re getting too tough for an old man like me,” he finally said.

    “Feel.” Stevie flexed his skinny arm. Cork felt mostly bone but made a face full of admiration. Stevie turned his attention back to cartoons.

    Jenny, Cork’s fourteen-year-old daughter, came into the room from the hallway. She gave her father only a glance before she curled up on the sofa with a book in her lap. He could tell by the way she looked at him that she was reflecting some of her mother’s mood. The whole house seemed suffused with the quiet cold of Jo’s anger.

    “Hi, kiddo. Where’s your mother?”

    “In her office, working. She’s waiting to talk with you.”

    He looked at the book in her lap. “What’s that?”

    “Mrs. Cavanaugh asked me to do a reading for the Christmas program next week.”

    “What reading?”

    “Whatever I want. A poem, I think. I’m going to read something by Sylvia Plath.”

    “Didn’t she kill herself?”

    “She was a very intelligent woman.”

    “What poem?”

    “I haven’t decided yet.”

    Cork sat down beside his daughter. She edged away. “Have you discussed this with Mrs. Cavanaugh?”

    “She said the choice was mine.”

    “Sylvia Plath. That doesn’t sound very Christmasy. Maybe we should talk about it,” Cork suggested.

    “The choice is mine,” his daughter said emphatically.

    Jenny was becoming more like Jo all the time. Even at fourteen her face already had the same tooserious shadowing. She was small, precocious, and full of radical energy. Her eyes were like her mother’s, too. A cold blue-white. But there were many things Jenny had done to make sure she was not like her mother. Jo had marvelous taste in her dress, yet Jenny chose to wear clothing bought at secondhand stores—old dresses and combat boots and ratty sweaters. With the help of a friend, she’d pierced each of her ears in two places, and she kept discussing the possibility of putting at least one hole in her nose. She streaked her hair with purple and sometimes wore it in short spikes that looked as if she’d grabbed hold of a live power line. She had given up smiling in favor of an attitude of disgust or sometimes simply ennui that was exaggerated by the sleepy look from her full-lidded eyes, part of the genetic Ojibwe legacy of her father.

    “Guess I’d better see what your mother wants, huh?”

    “Guess you’d better,” Jenny agreed.

    “Wish me luck,” he said.

    “Luck,” she offered him dourly.

    He found Jo at her desk in her office