The Idaho winters are dying. The winds blow less and less each year, and the snow seems to come later, once it has wandered and lost itself on the Canadian prairie or to volatile Midwestern ice storms, and only reaches my mountain valley a few days before Christmas. The mountainous, nine-foot high plowed piles of ice from my childhood are now three-foot gravel-filled humps cornering the driveways. The piles stand as misshapen, bleached sentinels guarding the breezeways and bridges of my dead-end country road.

But before the snow falls, after the potatoes are dug and the barley is stored up in silos that are capped and sealed with caulk, the cold creeps across the hills and settles in for a six-month stretch. The ground, chisel-plowed and duck-footed, is barren and brown. The stubble fields are spotty with golden straw stalks sticking up through swaths of blackened ash, left from the ritualistic fall burnings that recycle nitrogen to the soil. As I return from Tucson, the sagging barbed-wire fences and huddled houses along the highway, the shelves of snow-capped peaks on the horizon, remind me that nothing—not even dying—really ever changes. Sometimes there’s snow on the ground, and other times there’s just yellowing grass.

The night my wife and I arrive, I pull our luggage into my parent’s garage. Heads of animals killed by my father line the unfinished walls—glassy eyes of three trophy elk and a white-tailed buck stare down at me, the racks nailed to bare two-by-sixes that form the carport. Pepper, our four-year old border collie, stands quickly from her pillow with an irreverent tail wag that shakes her entire body. I can’t say that I’m as happy, but scratch her hard between the ears. Pepper lays back down, satisfied. She’s much fatter than when I left, so I make a mental note to discuss it with Abby, my youngest sister. The rest—my four other sisters and me—do much better dictating the rules rather than complying, and often delegate the nitty-gritties down to the more responsible, blondish seventh-grader.

The next morning, I leave for a jog down to the local chapel and find Pepper in the garage, growling at another black mutt whose hair is clumpy and stringy like a musk ox’s. Later, my mother tells me its name—Cubby—and its owners, a new family that lives in the cottonwoods. Charging at the larger, less-fierce dog, Pepper’s teeth glisten like rain-gutter icicles. Cubby prances, occasionally breaking for the interior, but Pepper cuts him off and lunges for his muzzle. She’s no guard dog, rather a high-strung cow dog that suffers from ADD, opting to roam underneath the apple trees and catch horseflies instead of participating in shepherding or pickup-truck riding. Unless Abby, who enjoys that familiar caretaker’s bond, was injured, the dog would not defend the family. If someone were to invade, Pepper would greet the intruder with her familiar sideways wag.

What distresses the dogs so much is plopped on Pepper’s pillow—a red fox squirrel, frozen solid. I jump, but once realize the creature is dead, try to pick it up. Pepper flashes a toothy snarl, so I sidestep and jog off into the clear, cold morning, leaving it to them to battle out.

The Mormon chapel, a red brick, two-story country church house with a simple white steeple, sits a mile and a half away. Our little rural community was founded around 1884, when Wilford Woodruff, a prophet, dictated the Wagon Box Prophecy, claiming that the cruel climate would be tempered if Latter-day Saints relocated from Salt Lake to farm the Idaho foothills. The first Mormon bishop in the area was named Clark; the chapel carries his name.

In my youth, it was a strange occurrence to meet someone who wasn’t Mormon, who you didn’t see at Sacrament Meeting or Boy Scouts. In those flat valley hinterlands, the church is society’s mechanism. I remember knowing the specific families that lived in the various slat-board manufactured homes and squatty brick houses that stood so woefully at the edges of the bare fields. Part of my knowledge came from a hand-crafted pole that stood on the corner of the highway, nailed with peeling planks of wood to direct travelers up or down the roads, names like SCHOLES or BARNES branded into the pieces with arrows pointing in the appropriate direction. Sadly, the sign is no longer; a Jefferson County snow plow must have clipped and ended its helpful, yet tacky, existence.

As I run, I think of my friends, the Martinez family, and how I should call them. They live a half-mile east of the church in a faded tan trailer. It sits back behind an irrigation canal and has an elevated, narrow bridge that I’ve nearly backed off of twice. Old, irregular corrals shaped from throw-away lumber, corrugated tin, and pallets make a shifty feedlot on most of their small property, and shaggy, mismatched cows lull in ankle-deep, soupy mess. Two of my best friends, Victor and Hector, live there. They’ve been fatherless since last November.

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The next day, I sit down with Abby at the kitchen table before she and Malorie, my fifteen-year old sister, drive into town for school. They’re both eating toast smeared with sloppy raspberry jam.

“You know, there’s this thing humans do,” I tell Abby. “We’ll eat as much as is in front of us.”

Abby continues to chew, rolls her eyes.

“Certain dogs can’t stop eating, either. Dad told me you just tear a hole in the dog food and let Pepper eat all she wants? You gotta knock that off, she’s getting way too fat.”

Malorie interjects, spitting jam onto the table. “Oh! My! Gosh! I thought you were talking about Abby!” and laughs sophomorically, as if cheerleaders surround her. Abby nods quietly and bites off more toast. They aren’t quite sure what to make of their college-educated brother who insists they ration out the Kibble-n-Bits with the acuity of a Weight Watcher, so they leave.

My mother—a short, kind-hearted woman attracted to homeopathic medicine and prone to tear up during Lifetime made-for-TV movies—enters the kitchen.

“It’s not Pepper’s fault she’s fat,” my mother says. “It’s the hysterectomy.”

This catches me off guard, and I imagine Pepper and Cubby lounging on the ditch bank, Pepper explaining that while she’d love to mother Cubby’s pups, it just wasn’t going to happen. I wonder if other surgeries as well, maybe a breast reduction, would be reasonably priced at the South Fork Vet Clinic to lift Pepper’s saggy, indecent mammary glands.

“And it doesn’t help that Jack died,” she adds. It’s never been confirmed, but openly believed, that Jack, our now-deceased Golden Retriever, had sired the summer litter of Pepper’s puppies. Jack was a sort of Don Juan on the dead-end street, and many of his bastard pups still roam there. Along with his natural tendency to impregnate every bitch on the block, Jack had an unhealthy fetish for porcupines—he tried to eat them. He finally died when undetected quills sunk deep into his nose and throat, lodging in his stomach, infecting him to the point of planting under the maple tree in our front yard. My father had him euthanized.

“We all deal with it differently,” I say to my mother. Out the kitchen window, we watch Pepper and Cubby racing in and out of pine trees at breakneck speeds. One catches the other, and they tumble together across the frozen grass.

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My friendship with Victor Martinez began the day my mother convinced me to invite him to Boy Scouts. The invitation was frightening enough, since Victor, at six-foot-four and three-hundred plus pounds, is the largest Mexican I’ve ever seen. The second largest is his younger brother, Hector, who became a friend when I started bumming rides with Victor after football practice. Hector is six inches shorter, but brawny as a bull-calf.

Victor and Hector’s massive shapes were a true anomaly since their father, Lauriano, weighed one-hundred and forty pounds. Both he and his wife worked at Idahoan Foods processing hash browns, and ran their eighty-acre hay farm on the side. When I stopped in, Lauriano was usually in their shop repairing a rusty tractor or feed truck—the only man I knew who kept a fifth of honey-colored liquor in the toolbox to pull from as he worked. Mrs. Martinez offered me heaping plates of rice and beans. Victor’s younger brothers, Omar and Amador, hovered close enough to laugh at my stories, but hid when I looked their way. I finally won them over by eating a habañero pepper in one bite, a feat that nearly hospitalized me.

Back then, Lauriano had an interesting way of arranging the chicken-pecked, gravely yard. It seemed as though parking the farm machinery in an orderly fashion, or arranging the one-ton, four by four by eight foot bales of hay in straight, high stacks were out of the question. It wasn’t uncommon to see two or three bales stacked lop-sided and tipping in random corners of the yard. Sometimes the maroon Dodge would be pulled in front of the house for an oil change. While the neighbors burned garbage in fifty-gallon oil drums, making sure to keep them out of sight, Lauriano displayed his at the corner of the bridge, sending the acidic fumes of charred corn cobs and chicken bones across the canal, where they settled in gray clouds on the road.

And it seemed that no matter how bad I had it, working after school or weekends, the Martinez boys had it ten times worse. Victor nearly wasn’t able to play football because Lauriano needed him on the farm, but ultimately his size and skill for the game won out. After practice, however, he jogged to his pickup in his sweaty football pants and drove straight home while the rest of us took our time showering and flipping each other with towels.

The one time I spoke with Lauriano was after my doctor’s appointment where I learned that a back surgery could salvage the nerves in my right leg. I went in search of Victor to tell him my last season of high school football—and subsequent dreams of playing for the New York Jets—were crushed. He wasn’t home. Hector and Lauriano were fixing fence along the road, so I spilled my sob story to them. Hector said nothing and stretched the barbed-wire tight with the rusty fencer. Lauriano, on the other hand, engaged me for the first time.

I had always assumed he didn’t know English. I stepped closer and elevated my voice, making a ring with my fingers and trying to say that my lumbar disks had bulged like jelly donuts. At a loss, I gave up.

Curt, direct, he said, “Just tell me. I understand. I American too.”

The Martinez family was Roman Catholic, but from junior high on, Victor attended Boy Scouts, played on church basketball teams, and even attended a Sacrament meeting every now and again. During potato harvest, he and I worked eighteen-hour days for Foster Agro, our only time off was driving to the valley for football practice.

The summer before my senior year, I quit the farm. It was a sunny Friday, and, tired of minimum wage and back-breaking hours, I just didn’t go. My father pulled up in his big white Chevy and we yelled at each other until his tires squelched out of the drive. Victor, working at George and Jessie’s OK Tire and cutting cabin logs on the weekends, gave me a job. I spent Saturday and Sunday with him, sleeping among tall sage brush and felling lodge pole pines. He did all the work—hefting the thirty-footers onto a hodge-podge trailer—but paid me more than my dad ever would.

After high school, Victor was recruited to play defensive line at Ricks, an extinct Mormon Junior College that required church attendance, regardless of the student’s denomination. Victor, and I shared our first dorm with four others—Victor was one of only eight non-Mormons on campus. One day after practice, Kendall, another friend from our hometown, reported that a Lutheran kid invited Victor to attend church with him a few towns away. Victor looked around the locker room—massive Mormons, in towels and sweaty, soaked shirts, slowed to listen—and he replied, “Why don’t you just come to mine?” He meant his Mormon one.

So even though my friends and I had spent our high school years vandalizing and cursing, we hadn’t pushed Victor away from the church. As is customary, the missionaries came to our apartment and taught Victor the lessons. We pulled our mattresses into the front room and sat cross-legged, scriptures balanced in the oversized crotches of our pajamas, toothpaste ringing our slackened mouths, while Victor learned about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.

On September 18^th, 2000, Victor was baptized by Greg Price, our nine-fingered half-back. Although the typical baptism consisted of an audience of a dozen or so, Victor’s crowd filled the chapel—an entire college football squad, coaches, cheerleaders, Rigby High students. But absent were Hector and Lauriano, Omar and Amador.

Freshman year forged us into something different. Victor lost his grandmother, and I sat on his bed as his giant shoulders heaved. Months later, Grandma Melba passed, and Victor watched my own silent shivering. At the end of term, Victor decided to spend the summer as a door-to-door salesman. The rest of us were called to preach the word to heathens in distant lands—I prepared to leave for Indiana that July.

A spoiled Jersey kid next door, one of our cohorts, knew he wouldn’t be back for two years, so he chained his barely used Diamondback BMX bike underneath the stairwell, hoping it would stay put until he returned. As soon as we dropped him off at the bus, Victor and I threw out the seventh commandment and Rexburg laws and bylaws; with a Leatherman, a screwdriver, and a large rock, we broke the lock and took the bike to Omar and Amador for an early birthday present.

A year into my mission, in a sweaty town named Shelbyville, I received a letter and a photo from Abby, who turned eight, the typical age at which children born into the church are baptized. It explained that since I was so far away, Victor had performed her baptism. The photo was stunning—Victor, dressed neck to ankle in white, roughly the size of a mattress, with one massive arm reaching down to the shoulder of my fragile young sister, who, also in white, barely crested his knees.

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It finally snows a few days before Christmas, and the squirrel disappears. I rise early to clean off the driveway and sidewalks, and Pepper stands watch, following every movement of the plastic shovel and prancing on the cold, naked pavement. She greets me every morning.

But three days before our trip ends, she’s not there. The thought doesn’t really strike me until I return from my jog to wake up my wife. My mother meets me at the door with the phone in her hand—her eyes are filled with tears: “Dave found Pepper on his lawn—she’s been hit.”

I think to find a gun—first instinct—but they’re all locked up. Instead, my mother drives me to Dave’s, a cousin-in-law, who has wrapped Pepper in a blue bathroom towel. When the dog sees the familiar SUV, she rises and coughs red foam.

Dave shows me speckled spots of snow painted with blood and saliva. My mother, late for work, asks that I load Pepper into the backseat of my aunt’s Chevy Avalanche and take her to the vet. When I do, Pepper lays her head down on the seat without a whimper.

“Don’t let her suffer,” my mother says, holding my elbow. “Put her down if you have to.”

“She’s not mine—don’t put that on me.” My mother leaves without an answer.

At speeds reckless for the icy roads, I rush into town, passing dilapidated farms, chapels, and the Rigby-Pioneer cemetery. A young, calm veterinarian at South Fork checks Pepper’s reflexes, tests her strength, X-rays her chest. Surprisingly, the dog has no broken ribs, ruptured diaphragm, or deflated lungs. As the vet pumps Pepper full of dexamethasone, he explains that she probably just got bonked on the head. He warns the risk, however, is prevalent—if her brain swells, she’s as good as gone. He prescribes food and water, a warm place, close monitoring.

The thought of choosing life or death lifted, the drive home is much slower, almost pleasant. I speak to Pepper in low, hushed tones, and think that in some countries, Pepper would be an entrée. When I make the left turn into our drive, she lifts up in the backseat, recognizing the yard and garage. Her body begins to wag side to side, and she—in the most innocent, supine way—defecates. I use the towel to clean off the seat and carry her inside.

I had called ahead to Renae asking her to remove the rugs from the back guest bathroom and to lay down Pepper’s pillow. I lower the dog and begin to clean off her backside. Renae says, “You’re gonna make a great dad.”

Whether it’s the motion or the feeling that crowds the half-bath, I remember my Uncle Vance, who died several years before from HIV complications. A cocaine addict and homosexual, once he contracted the virus he drastically limited communications with his eleven siblings and widowed mother. But when the family was informed that Vance’s tired body was failing, five of the sisters and my grandmother rushed to Salt Lake for his last hours. Days after the funeral, my mother told me how gratifying it was to be in Vance’s house and, along with the other familial matrons, wash, dry, and dress him before he closed his eyes for good.

As Pepper buries her muzzle into a dish of water, draining three bowlfuls in minutes, I remember the day that Victor lost his father. I had ditched my weekend farm obligations to watch a college football game with two friends. It was early November, the coldness having settled in a month previous, still snowless and yellow. When my mother rang my cell-phone, I almost didn’t answer, assuming it would be some request to assist with the endless cattle vaccinations or welding. But, in her shaky bad-news voice—one I’d heard for my grandmothers, crop disasters, Vance, and pets—she tells me that a hay bale fell on Lauriano Martinez, and that even though the ambulance made it, I needed to come down to comfort the boys.

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Only Hector and Omar were at home—the rest in Idaho Falls at the hospital. In the yard, off to the left, I saw the mound of residual hay from the broken bale, and a loader tractor parked beside it. A fierce wind blew from the south.

Hector explained that his father and Omar had been feeding, and that Lauriano had forgotten something inside and walked back to the house alone. Blustery, bitter, the wind compelled Lauriano to walk next to a three-bale stack. It happened in seconds: the wind blew off the top bale, and it crushed Lauriano. Omar said the thud was almost inaudible due to the wind, and he turned from the fence to see the bale rocking to a lopsided stop on top of his father.

Hector, working a shift at the tire store, beat the ambulance. By then, Omar and his mother had cut the six twine strings holding the bale together and ripped off chunks of prickly hay by hand. But the result was unanticipated; instead of allowing more give, the bale peeled and flattened around Lauriano’s body. With the loader tractor, they picked up what they could, and tore Lauriano out from underneath.

Hector related all of this to me in a stoic manner. He shook his head a few times and kicked gravel with the toe of his boot, but other than that he dictated as factually as a police blotter. Unlike Victor, he would not let me see him cry.

That night, three other friends and I visited the hospital. Victor had not yet arrived, so in the waiting room, we watched Omar and Amador squeeze their nose bridges to stanch the tears. Victor’s mother cried and cried, and in her strained Spanish explained that intentaron, intentaron, hicieron todo lo possible. They tried, they tried, they did everything they could.

In the hallway, I grabbed Hector and explained that in the Mormon Church and as Elders, my friends and I could give his father a priesthood blessing, anointing his head with sacred healing oil and blessing his body with peace and comfort. Hector, having lived and worked with Mormons his entire life, having heard us cuss and crack beers, talk about dirty women and skipping Church, declined, saying, “It’s okay, man. You know, he was Catholic.”

When Victor arrived, he spoke hushed to the nurse and waved us back to the room. Down the hallway, I told him what Hector had said, and, nodding, eyes damp and distant, he rocked my shoulder with his massive hand, and said nothing. In the room, Lauriano, tubes in his nose and mouth, IVs hanging from an aluminum tree, lines snaking into the skin opposite his elbow, was eggplant purple. His gown had fallen down like a toga, exposing his bruised and swollen chest. His shaved head was also swollen, and hot to the touch. The four of us anointed his broken body with the oil, placing our hands—hands with which we had flipped the bird, unclasped bra straps, and used for a number of ungodly acts—on his hand, avoiding his damaged head, to pronounce a healing blessing. Looking back and forth to Victor and his father, I believed we could save the man. Even though Jesus didn’t start until thirty, I expected that we, none older than twenty-three, had faith to work miracles.

After the blessing and another round in the waiting room, we walked quietly out to the parking lot and realized it was snowing.

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Pepper’s vomit coats the tile floor. I open the backdoor to air it out, and the dog stands and hobbles before I catch her. Walking like a newborn fawn, knees unbending, head hanging loosely and waving side to side, she falls down three stairs and finally crawls to her normal corner in the garage.

I shut the doors and plug in a space heater to coax her health back, but it seems that the only thing she wants is water, water, water. Four more bowlfuls lapped up faster than her strength allows. I put on a glove and pet her until she falls asleep.

At three in the afternoon, Abby and Malorie return. When Malorie demands that Abby open the garage door, Pepper stumbles out, vomiting, and lies down in a snow bank. Abby screams and, before I can explain, shoots downstairs and slams her door. Once Pepper has cooled, I carry her back inside.

Abby, calmed, comes out. Awkwardly, I put my arm around her and, mimicking Hector, explain the situation in an even tone. Sniffling, she gets a dishful of food, takes my glove, and sits down beside Pepper, whispering beautiful things.

Renae and I leave to Idaho Falls for last minute purchases, and don’t get home until ten. Although the garage door is barracked down, Pepper isn’t inside. I ask my father, who’s watching The Weather Channel—anticipating a severe cold front—if he’s seen her.

“She got out—looked pretty hot,” he says.

“I wonder if she was hit,” I tell him. “Nothing wrong inside, didn’t even bark when I picked her up.”

“She was walking good earlier.”

“Could someone just have whacked her on the head with a shovel? I mean, she’s too smart to get hit by a car.”

He sits back. “I haven’t seen Henry’s dog either, or that black one. Maybe someone poisoned them.”

Sadly, this is not uncommon. Since all the neighbors own livestock, packs of dogs cause unneeded stress and death. The favorite local remedy is TNT, or Temik ’n Tuna, concocted by hiding Temik pellets—an insecticide dispersed over potato plants—into meat and setting the mixture out for the pests; its ingestion causes an agonizing and drawn-out death. My father’s diagnosis makes sense, and my family begins to implicate strange neighbors with motives.

That night, I search the backyard, pasture, and canal bank with a Mag-light, whistling, calling. After twenty minutes or so, I’m too cold to keep looking—it’s below zero. She’s gone off somewhere to die alone.

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The day after the accident, Hector needed help with the herd, so that Sunday three other locals and I ditched church and lined up pickups and horse trailers to load the ratty calves and transport them to working chutes five miles away. We left the mother cows and bulls, broken teeth and short gums, in the corral. It was a misty, depressing, low-hanging day. I joked with George Byram, the owner of the tire store, about high school sports and other meaningless things. Hector, the new patron of the Martinez herd, directed traffic and loaded the bunches, shouting and chasing with sticks.

At the corrals, we medicated, castrated, and dehorned the calves. They wandered down the alleyway confused and jumpy, looking side-to-side for their familiar hay stacks and milk bags. Then we slammed them into the squeeze chute. The injections—two quick shots in the rump. Castration via a thick green rubber band cinched tight around the scrotum, cutting off the circulation. Their shriveled sacks dropped off in weeks. If they were too mature, we’d cut them out with a pocket knife. Dehorning was done with a tool that looked like an oversized pair of toenail clippers. The sickening crunch—done with a fierce outward handle thrust, supposedly painless—severs a vein that supplies the horn with blood. Once clipped, it continues to pump with the calves’ heartbeat, and makes them look like undead victims of B-grade horror flicks, crimson fountains spraying and hanging heavy in the mist. When the chute opened, the calves wandered out, shaking their lightened heads, and clumped at the back of the corral.

When we finished, we were covered in blood. Streaks painted the calves’ shoulders and foreheads, and it seeped into our tan coats and leather gloves. By the end, we had stopped joking, knowing how the Martinez’s must feel to be separated from life with a crack, a thud, a residue that coated everything. We shut our mouths and waved as we pulled the empty trailers home.

After the blessing, Lauriano improved, but three weeks later was transported to Salt Lake. Nothing could be done. The family removed the life support, and Lauriano expired soon after.

His funeral was held in a crumbling Catholic church in Idaho Falls. Unlike the Mormon services to which I’m accustomed, where the families spend hours telling cute and unlikely stories about the deceased, laughing over ham and scalloped potatoes, the Catholic version required us to kneel and pray, everyone wore black, and most of the congregation wept. I was detoured and missed the funeral procession, ending up back at the Rigby-Pioneer cemetery behind the rest.

On that cold, gray day, the empty maple trees seemed to loom up out of the ground like skeletal hands, tarsals and metatarsals, boney knuckles, blackened fingernails. Wet snow coated the ancient headstones, and trails from cars to the grave site wormed through the slush.

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Pepper doesn’t return and we mourn the fact we can’t bury her. Malorie calls Cubby’s owners. He’s dead, too; a few days earlier, he crawled into his house and never came out. His paws were covered with chemical burns, his mouth and tongue ruined.

The morning we leave for the airport, I haul wrapping paper and gift boxes behind the shop to burn them. It takes one match to ignite. I stand outside, letting warmth wash over me as I take in the expansive, bleak horizon. I hear a sharp whine, and whistle. A strange bark jumps from behind the apple trees. It’s Pepper, trapped underneath a pile of rotten fencing boards. She’s chewed at the wood, clawed at the earth—too weak to pull her own body from underneath the stack. I jerk her out by the paws. She stumbles ten yards and collapses.

Carrying her into the garage, rushing into the house, calling my father and mother—I’m elated. What a way to leave town, I think. I found her, she’ll live! As Renae loads our luggage, I shut down the garage and stuff a white pill coated in peanut butter down Pepper’s throat, thinking myself a hero. As we leave, I text my sisters: FOUND PEPPER! GONNA B OK!

Days later, I talk to my mother, who tells me that the dog is surviving, Abby’s giving her meds and making sure she’s fed and watered. My mother adds, “I think Pepper’s heartbroken without Cubby. All she does is wander out to the driveway, look around, and wander back.”

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My second day in Idaho, Victor and I drove to see his family. He stayed in the car on a phone call—still a door-to-door salesman, but pulling down six-figures. Hector, Omar, and Amador pitched hay with their backs to me. The yard was immaculate: the hay stacked four-high and in one long, straight row; the trucks and tractors lined up. Doors and windows closed tight. The mangers were clean from rotting feed and straw. The shop doors, shut; the fences, tall and taut. No broken bales in sight.

Not used to the cold, I flipped up my hood. Before I left, my hair was long and unkempt; now it was shaved. I wore sunglasses. When they heard me crunching through the straw and turned, they didn’t recognize me.

Amador stammered a confused, “Fish?” My high school nickname, Fish, was given by a bully who converted my perfectly shaped earlobes into droopy, detached, nipple-shaped flabs. But when Amador said it, I smiled—instantly I wanted to move back, live in a trailer, throw away my books, and pitch hay.

They were strong and handsome. Amador, seventeen, had a nest of nappy black hair; Omar barely fit in his coveralls. Hector showed me a ’73 Mustang, and talked Victor into giving him a ride to the auto body shop to retrieve a project truck. In the car, we joked and cussed, Victor punching me in the thigh when I teased him about slaving for The Man; me feigning and jabbing when he claimed he’d marry one of my sisters.

The project—a 1985 Chevy Short Box pickup—was painted a shining cherry red. Although a skeleton of what it would be—lacking windows, door handles, gauges, a radio, the seat wasn’t even bolted down—it was one step closer. Victor paid, and Hector decided to take it to George and Jessie’s for rims and tires before the snow arrived.

I climbed in the truck with Hector, and he laughed, telling me I’d freeze my ass off. We rolled down the highway. I’d never driven at high speeds without a windshield. The air rushed into the cab. I cinched my hood up; the bridge of my sunglasses froze and dug into my nose. Hector, hands at Ten and Two, shivered through his thick black work coat. I turned around and screamed an incoherent string of profanity. Behind us, Victor crawled along with his hazard lights flashing. I showed him both my middle fingers.

Hector pushed the truck up to forty-five, and the straining engine combined with the winter air thundered around the cab. Hector looked at me and laughed. I opened my mouth to do the same, but the cold busted through my teeth’s enamel, channeling into the nerves of my molars and incisors, grinding into my jawbone, settling in my spinal column like the dull ache of a smashed thumb. Hector closed his mouth and looked away, I did the same.

By the time we passed the cemetery, the cold steadily wrestled tears out of our stubborn eyes, lines streaking across Hector’s temples, the wetness flitting out the absence of a back window. We rumbled towards town without hesitation, giving the implication of such emotions no clout, no time, not even a second glance through the red metal frame where something solid used to be.

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Ten days later, from sunny Arizona, I call my mother for an update on Pepper.

“She’s dead—froze this morning.”

I remember sitting on the garage step, watching my black-gloved hand disappear into Pepper’s midnight fur.

My mother laughs a strained, forgiving laugh. “It was so strange—it’s been so cold here, last night it dropped to twenty-two below.” She chokes up. “I thought I’d bring in the heater, because she hasn’t been leaving her pillow, but didn’t, just shut the doors.”

I think, How many times can you watch something revive only to expire, breathe only to choke, warm only to freeze?

“She was on her pillow, just like the squirrel. I bawled for ten minutes,” she says.

“Abby?” I ask.

“That’s what’s funny. I went downstairs to wake her, and,” she laughs through her tears, “when I ask her if she’s okay, she says, just flat ‘Yeah, Mom, don’t worry—I’m through the worst.’”