Not cold the way people in warm states talk about it, like it’s a number on a phone screen or a reason to wear a nicer jacket. I mean the kind of cold that takes shape. The kind that waits outside a door like a debt collector and steps inside the second someone lets it.
It was forty below in Mercer Hollow, North Dakota. The wind had teeth. The windows in Uncle Daryl’s house had iced over from the inside, and every time the furnace kicked on it rattled like it was begging for mercy.
I was nineteen. My little brother, Benji, was ten.
And Daryl had been drinking since noon.
“You eat my food, burn my propane, and talk back in my own house,” he said, standing in the kitchen in a stained flannel shirt with his face gone red and shiny. “I’m done.”
My hand tightened around the back of a chair. “He’s ten.”
Benji stood halfway behind me, clutching a paperback copy of Hatchet so hard the corners bent. He had that thin, pale winter face kids get in hard country, with huge eyes and a knit cap pulled low over his ears.
