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asked.
    “No,” he said, his tone a little hurt. “I mean I smoke a little. But not much. Not like the crowd back home.”
    Birdy pressed him. “How much is a little?”
    “Once a week, maybe? I don’t have any with me if that’s what you are worried about.”
    “If you stay, it is only until the end of the school year.”
    Birdy could scarcely believe her own words, but her sister’s complaints resonated. They were unfair, but they still hurt. She had gone away. She had created a new life outside the reservation. Maybe she owed Summer something? Even if Summer was harsh, mean, a bitch, she was her blood.
    So was Elan.
    “If I call her and tell her that it’s all right for you to stay here, would that be okay with you?” she asked.
    Elan looked at Birdy. His eyes were so dark brown they were almost black. They looked wet, pooling with tears.
    “Do you promise I can stay?” He wasn’t going to cry. Elan was toughing it out. It might have been because he was a teenager, and no teenage boy wants to fall to pieces in front of a grown-up. It might also have been that he’d been cried out. Something painful had forced him from his home to hers.
    “Yes,” she said, “on three conditions.”
    The boy looked hopeful. “What?”
    “You’ll have to tell me why you’re here.”
    “I can’t,” he said. “Not now.”
    Birdy landed her hand softly on Elan’s shoulder. She felt a slight tremble, and then he rolled his shoulder to shake her off. “Fine, but later you will, won’t you?”
    “I’ll try,” he said.
    “Promise?”
    “I promise.”
    Birdy got up and went to get her phone from her purse on the console table by the door. Elan’s muddy footprints had dried on the gleaming wooden floor of the old house. Birdy hadn’t wanted to be one of those “take off your shoes” type of people, but she’d spent a lot of money refinishing those floors.
    “What’s the second condition, Aunt Birdy?”
    She turned and faced him with a serious look.
    “You have to get your own robe,” she said, staying deadpan. “You look ridiculous.”
    Elan smiled. It was a disarming smile, one that was at once sad and happy at the same time.
    “I have my stuff in the dryer,” he said, indicating the rumbling machine in the other room.
    “Good. I like that you know how to do your laundry. Might be good having you here for a visit.”
    “I’m good at lots of stuff,” he said. “What’s the last condition?”
    “School, Elan. You miss one day and you’re on a bus back home. Understood?”
    He tugged at the belt of the robe and offered what his aunt considered reluctant agreement.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Understood.”
    Birdy went into the kitchen and left a message on her sister’s cell when Summer didn’t answer.
    “Summer,” she said. “Elan is with me. He’s fine. Don’t know why he’s here. Do you? Call me.”
    Elan appeared in the kitchen doorway, now dressed in his original clothes and radiating the warmth of the dryer.
    “She never answers her phone,” he said.
    “She will call me the minute she gets the message.”
    “You think so?” he asked.
    “She’s your mother.”
    “You don’t know her, Aunt Birdy.”
    She stared at him for a second, assessing, wondering, processing.
    “What do you mean by that?” she asked him.
    “Nothing.”
    “Elan, talk to me.” Her words were direct but tempered with concern.
    Elan crossed his arms. It was a gesture that was right out of a seminar she took on body language, which she thought was a complete waste of time because her patients were all dead and the only language they spoke was silent.
    Elan wasn’t going to talk.
    “Don’t you have a dead body to go look at?” he asked.
    His tone was a little smart-alecky just then, but he was correct.
    Or at least partially.
    It was only a foot.
     
     
    That night at dinner in the family’s comfortable log home in South Kitsap, Tracy Montgomery picked at her chicken fingers when she discussed finding the