There was a basketball rolled into the crease of the couch, and a guitar hung from a hook next to the door, but otherwise the room was a reflection of someone who liked to cook, read, and listen to music. Someone self-contained, self-sufficient, content with her own company, having no need in her day-to-day life for a telephone, cable TV, or Net access.

Someone, perhaps, who placed a high value on the qualities of solitude and silence.

Every lantern was lit, and the kettle was steaming on the woodstove. Dirty dishes had been washed and put away in the cupboard and the counter swept free of crumbs. The loaves of bread from that morning’s baking were wrapped in tinfoil and the kettle of last night’s stew had been removed to the cooler on the porch outside the front door. The cushions on the couch were plumped up, the books on the shelves were lined up. The cassette tapes were stacked in neat piles, labels out. Except for on the guitar, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t a notorious neatnik. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate someone doing her chores for her. It was just that she was used to doing for herself. It made her inexplicably uneasy to be done for.

Still, she managed a smile for both man and boy. At face value, they were both well worth it. Ethan looked like a Viking, tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes; his forebears could have come from anywhere so long as anywhere was Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. Johnny was at that ungainly stage of adolescence when his limbs were growing out beyond his control, but he would be tall, too. He bore a striking resemblance to his father, thick dark hair over a heavy brow, deep-set blue eyes, firm mouth, strong chin. He would never be handsome, but his face, once seen, would never be forgotten.

“Hey,” she said, shrugging out of her parka.

“Hey,” Ethan said, catching it and leaning down to kiss her at the same time.

Johnny was sitting at the table, hunched over a book, and Kate instinctively pulled back. Ethan maintained his smile, but there was a frown at the back of his eyes. “Had dinner?”

“Yeah, I had dinner up to Ruthe and Dina’s.”

Ethan’s lips pursed in a long, low whistle. “Lucky girl. They have pie?”

“Rhubarb and something extra.”

“I’m jealous.”

“It was good,” Kate admitted. She pulled her bibs down and hung them next to the parka. The coat hook was crowded with Johnny’s and Ethan’s parkas and bibs, and hers were elbowed onto the floor. She picked them up and jammed them on the hook again. This time, they stayed.

“I was about to make some cocoa.”

“I’d like that. It was a long ride home.”

Ethan turned to the kettle. “What were you doing up at the old gals’ place?”

“I went there to ask them to help with Dan.”

“Ah.” He was silent for a moment, measuring cocoa and honey and evaporated milk into three mugs. “I wasn’t expecting you to charge off that way this morning when I came galloping over with the news.”

Kate raised one shoulder. “He’s a friend.”

“Urn.” He brought her a mug. It had miniature marsh-mallows in it. She repressed a shudder.

He gave a second mug to Johnny, who grunted a thank-you without looking up, and came back to sit next to where she was curled up on the couch. He stretched out his long legs and propped his feet on the burl-wood coffee table, about the only piece of furniture in the room that had any pretension to style. “What did Dina and Ruthe have to say?”

“Well, they weren’t surprised. They said the current administration wants to drill for oil in the Arctic, and it follows that they-the administration-will try to get rid of every bureaucrat who thinks otherwise.”

“They don’t have the votes in Congress, do they?”

“Ruthe says they don’t.” Kate tried to drink some cocoa without allowing her lips to come into contact with the marshmallows. It wasn’t easy. “But I don’t think she or Dina have a lot of confidence that the situation is going to stay that way.”

“You for it or against it?”

“What? Drilling in ANWR?” Kate thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth on it. I’ve been to Prudhoe Bay; they did a good job there. Then I think of Valdez, and how badly they did there. And then I think-” She stopped.

“What?”

“Well… well, it’s just that maybe, once in a while, we should let a beautiful thing be, you know?” She looked at him. “What else is left like that?” She looked at Johnny, still hunched over his homework. “What do we leave behind when we’re gone if we move into it now with D-nines?”

Ethan finished his chocolate. “I’m for it.”

“You’re for drilling?”

“Yeah. There’ll be jobs, Kate. It’s easy for you to say let it be, but I’ve got kids to support and educate.”

“Your father raised four sons single-handedly before there was an oil patch.”

“I’m not my father.”

They were both angry, both aware of it, and both made a conscious decision to pull back from that anger. Ethan leaned forward to place his mug on the coffee table. “Where’d you get this table, anyway?”

“Buck Brinker made it for Emaa,” she said. “I brought it home when she died.”

“Thought I recognized the work. Nice piece.”

“I like it. What did you do today?”

“Chopped wood.”

“Filled up your woodshed?”

“Nope.” He stretched, his joints popping, and gave her a lazy grin. “Filled yours.”

“Oh. Ah. Well. Thanks.”

“Thank me later.”

She gave Johnny’s back a warning glance.

Ethan’s grin faded. “We’ve got to talk about this, Kate.”

“Not now.”

“It’s always ‘Not now.” When?“

Johnny sat up and closed his book with a decisive thump. “There!” He swiveled in his chair. “Done!” He fixed Kate with a hopeful eye.

“What?” she said.

He looked at the guitar.

So did she. Dust lay over it like a shroud.

“You said you would,” Johnny said.

“I know I did,” Kate said, reflecting on the unwisdom of making promises to adolescents. They were worse than elephants. It never occurred to her to renege, though. She set her mug next to Ethan’s and got to her feet, ignoring the stifled sigh she heard Ethan give.

The guitar was an old Gibson that had belonged to Kate’s father, who had left it behind when he died, along with an extensive collection of folk songs from the fifties, some with musical notation, some with only the chords penciled in over the stanzas, some just with the lyrics scribbled on a page torn from a school notebook. Collected in a black three-ring binder so old that the plastic cover was peeling away from itself, they were as foreign to Johnny as Bach was to Kate. She got the binder down and opened it on the coffee table, motioning Johnny to her side.

“Well,” Ethan said with a lightness that was obviously forced, “I’m heading for home. See you back at the house, Johnny.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said.

“Or he can sack out here on the couch,” Kate said. “Our Jane DEW line hasn’t gone off in a while, so it should be safe.” Jane was Johnny’s mother and Jack’s ex-wife, and a roaring bitch into the bargain. The good news was that she hated Kate with every part and fiber of her being. The bad news was she was trying to find her son in Kate’s keeping so she could charge Kate with kidnapping.

All this stemmed from Johnny’s father’s death the previous year. Jane had taken Johnny to Arizona to live with her mother, who was seventy-three and lived in a retirement community. Johnny had hated Arizona, hated the retirement community, and had nothing in common with his grandmother, who was into golf in a major way and who had considered her child-rearing days over once she got Jane out of the house. One morning, he’d put a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, a liter bottle of Coke, and a copy of Between Planets into his knapsack, swiped forty bucks out of his grandmother’s purse, and hitched a ride on a semi loaded with lettuce. A Volkswagen van full of antiglobalization activists took him as far as Eugene, where he hooked up with a defrocked cop who was moving to Coeur d’Alene and who dropped him in Spokane. He walked across the border under the noses of Canadian immigration, hitched a ride on a U-Haul van full of furniture belonging to a family whose man was transferring from RPetCo Lima to RPetCo Prudhoe Bay, the driver of which was looking for a free ride to Alaska and didn’t mind having company to keep him awake during the thousand-mile-plus journey. He dropped Johnny at the entrance to the Park on his way down the Glenn Highway to Anchorage. Johnny walked the rest of the way, appearing on Kate’s doorstep tired, angry, and determined to stay.