When I was twelve, I asked him why.
He was in the garage. Changing the oil in Sandra’s car.
“Dad,” I said. “Why do you let her do everything?”
He didn’t look up.
“Because I can’t do it alone, Wren,” he said. “I tried. After your mom. I couldn’t. Sandra keeps everything running.”
“But she’s mean to me.”
He stopped.
He looked at me. For a second.
Then he looked back at the oil filter.
“She’s not mean,” he said. “She’s just organized. Give her a chance.”

The night before the mountain, I came home from a double shift at the diner at eleven-thirty.
My father and Sandra were at the kitchen table. In the greige kitchen.
Sandra had a folder in front of her.
“Sit down, Wren,” she said.
I sat.
“We’ve been talking,” Sandra said. “Your father and I. You’re nineteen. You’ve been out of high school for a year. You’re working at a diner. You’re not going to college. You don’t contribute to this household.”
“I pay rent,” I said. “Two hundred a month. Since I was eighteen. You made me.”
“That doesn’t cover your share,” Sandra said.
“My share of what?”
Sandra ignored that.
“Tyler’s moving back home,” she said. “From Fort Collins. He needs the space. And honestly, honey, it’s time for you to stand on your own two feet.”

I looked at my father.
“Dad?”
He was looking at the table.
“Your mother’s family has a cabin,” he said. “Up on Whitfield Ridge. It’s been empty for years. Nobody’s using it. You can have it.”
“A cabin.”
“It’s a fresh start,” Sandra said. “You’ve always liked the mountains.”
“When?”
Sandra closed the folder.
“Tomorrow,” she said.

They were in my jacket pocket. From the diner. Nature Valley. Oats and honey. I’d grabbed them on my break the day before and forgotten about them.
I ate one at five o’clock. When it got dark.
I saved the other one.

I figured out the stove.
There was a box of wooden matches on the shelf. Old. Some of them didn’t strike. I found newspaper in a pile by the door. Yellowed. From 2009. I crumpled it up. I found kindling in the shed. Split pine. Dry.
It took me nine matches.
On the tenth, the fire caught.

I sat in front of it on the braided rug.
In my jacket. With my knees pulled up. With the door of the stove open so I could see the flames.
I didn’t cry.
That surprised me.
I sat there and watched the fire and thought about my mother’s glass bird. In the trunk of my father’s truck. Driving away down the mountain.
I thought about the little blue light it made on the kitchen counter.
That means the day will be good.

I went out to the shed for more wood at seven. The sun was coming up over the ridge. Pink and gold on the snow.
I heard something.
A whimper. Behind the shed. Where the woodpile leaned against the wall.
I walked around.

A dog.
Lying in a hollow between two stacks of split logs. Curled up as small as he could get.
A German shepherd. Or mostly. Black and tan. Big. Or he would have been, once.
Now he was skin and bones.
His ribs showed through his coat like the rungs of a ladder. His fur was matted with ice. His right back leg was stiff, stretched out at an angle like it didn’t bend right.
He looked up at me.
Brown eyes. Tired. Old. Gray around the muzzle.
He didn’t growl.
He didn’t move.
He just looked at me.
Like I was the first thing he’d seen in a long time.

“Hey,” I said softly. “Hey, buddy.”
I knelt down in the snow.
He watched me.
I held out my hand. Slowly.
He sniffed it.
Then he put his head down on his paws and sighed. A long, shaky, exhausted sigh.

He ate that too.
Then he got up.
Slowly. Painfully. Favoring the stiff leg. He limped out of the hollow between the woodpiles.
He walked over to me.
And he leaned his whole weight against my knee.

All of it. Every pound he had left. Against my leg. Like he’d decided I was the thing he was going to hold on to.

There was no food.
I’d checked every cupboard. Every shelf. Every drawer. A tin of baking soda. A jar of salt. A box of tea bags so old they’d turned to dust.
That was all.

I thought about walking down the mountain.
Eleven miles. In sneakers. In eight inches of snow. In a thin jacket. With a dog who couldn’t walk.
It would take all day. Maybe longer. If I got lost, if I fell, if it got dark—
I thought about Sandra in her fur-lined boots.
You’ll be fine, Wren.

I stayed.
I kept the fire going.
I drank water from the pump. It took twenty minutes of priming before it ran. Brown at first. Then clear. Ice cold. It hurt my teeth.
I gave Dutch water in a chipped bowl.
He drank all of it.

>>PART 3

My Father and Stepmother Took Everything I Had and Left Me in an Old Cabin, but They Had No Idea What Was Hidden Inside