“All right, let me ask you both a question: had Gar mentioned anything that might indicate he was sick? A headache? Feeling tired? Anything unusual?”

“No, nothing,” his mother said, and Edgar nodded in agreement. “I thought a lot about that last night. If he wasn’t feeling well, he didn’t say anything.”

“Would he have?”

“Maybe not. He hated going to the doctor. He says”-she paused a second and corrected herself-“said, I mean, they never fix things. They only make you feel worse.”

“Who’s your doctor?”

“Jim Frost. Same as everyone else around here, I suppose.”

“He can fill me in on Gar’s medical history?”

“He can. There’s nothing much. The only thing that even remotely resembled a medical problem was needing glasses.”

“Uh-huh. Okay.” This, too, Glen noted.

“All right. Edgar, I’m going to ask you to tell me what you remember about your father when you went back into that barn. I want to understand if he was conscious, whether you talked to him, or what.”

He was awake when I came back.

“Did you talk to him?”

No. But he was breathing.

“Could he talk?”

No.

“What did you think had happened?”

I didn’t know. He wanted to clear the scrap buckets from under the workshop stairs. When I came downstairs, he was lying in the middle of the workshop. I thought he’d hit his head, but he hadn’t. I opened up his coat. I couldn’t see anything wrong. “Then what happened?”

Then he stopped breathing.

There was silence in the office. Glen looked at Edgar and grunted sympathetically. “That’s all?”

Yes.

“And then Pop showed up.”

I guess.

“You don’t remember?”

No.

“What’s the next thing you do remember?”

Waking up in the house. Doctor Papineau talking on the telephone.

“You don’t remember walking back to the house?”

No.

“Do you remember doing anything after you went back to the barn besides being with your father?”

No.

“Your hands are beat up. Did that happen when the phone got smashed?”

No. I was banging on the pen doors to make the dogs bark.

“Why?”

To make noise.

“In case someone drove by?”

So if an ambulance came they would know to look in the kennel.

“Right.” He wrote for a minute in his notebook. “Smart. Just so you know, the operator was still on the line when you did that. She reported hearing what sounded like dogs barking.”

Just then there was a knock on the door, and Annie’s muffled voice. “Glen, boiler repair is here.”

“Okay,” he said, loudly. “Send them downstairs, would you? I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He turned back to them. “Among my glorious duties, I supervise certain aspects of maintenance.” He grinned. “They haven’t asked me to wash dishes yet, though.”

He wrote something in his notes, then looked up. “Well, I know you two have a lot on your minds. There are some formalities to take care of, and then we’re done. Trudy, I’d like to talk to you alone before we finish up.”

She looked at Edgar. “Will you be okay waiting outside?”

He nodded. He and Almondine walked into the empty foyer. From the depths of the building came the banging of hammers on pipe and the long creeeeeee of rusted threads being turned. He looked at Annie’s neatly arranged desk-the microphone, the plant, the canister of pencils, the trays of forms-but when he tried to focus on anything his gaze kept skittering away.

Almondine ambled into the hallway and down to the entrance and he followed. On the street, a truck with the words “LaForge Heating and Repair, Ashland, WI” was parked behind their pickup. The day had warmed, and the street was filled with a soup of brown slush. Pale icicles dispensed a procession of water drops from the diner’s eaves. He opened the truck door and climbed in beside Almondine.

Doctor Frost rounded the corner. He entered the town hall through the door they’d just exited. Edgar tipped his head back and closed his eyes and pulled off his gloves so that his aching hands might go numb in the cold.

HIS MOTHER CLIMBED INTO the truck and keyed the ignition and they sat there while the truck idled. A semi passed on Main Street, slush flying in its wake. Further on, the little white spire of the Presbyterian church rose against the blue sky. She put her hands on the steering wheel and straightened her elbows.

“Doctor Frost-” she began, then stopped and drew a shaky breath.

Tell me.

“It’s the law that when someone dies unexpectedly, they have to do an autopsy to find out what happened. You know what an autopsy is, right?”

Edgar nodded. One happened practically every night on the detective shows.

His mother sighed. He could see she had been afraid she would have to explain it.

“The main thing to know is that your father wasn’t in pain. Doctor Frost said that it didn’t hurt. What happened is, there’s a place in a person’s head called the Circle of Willis. It’s in their brain, way down inside. You father had an aneurysm near there. That means one of his blood vessels was weak and it just broke. And that place where it was weak was so important, that he…he couldn’t live after that.”

Edgar nodded again. He didn’t know what else to say; it was so definitive. There was even a name for the place where things had gone wrong: the Circle of Willis.

“Doctor Frost said everyone is born with little flaws in their arteries and veins. Weak spots. Most people go through their whole life and never know. The flaws aren’t in places that matter: their arms, their legs. For a few people, the flaws are in bad places, and even then, those people can go their whole lives and nothing happens. But in some people, people who have a weak spot in an important place, that weak spot breaks. Sometimes they die from it. Nobody knows why it happens to some people and not others.”

His mother sat there and looked out the windshield. She laid her hand on Almondine’s neck and smoothed her fur down, and then slid her hand over to Edgar’s shoulder.

Thank you for telling me, he signed.

She turned and looked at him, really focused on him, for the first time since they’d left the house.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She didn’t look like she was going to cry, only slack and exhausted and determined. “I think it’s better to know what happened than not,” she said. “Don’t you?”

Yes.

“And it doesn’t mean anything like that is going to happen to you or me. We have those flaws, just like everyone, but they aren’t in important places.” This, with an air of finality.

Yes.

“I have to go to Brentson’s now. Are you sure you want to come along?”

He had told her yes, and he meant it. He wasn’t scared of the funeral preparations. What scared him was sitting at home, alone, knowing he wouldn’t have the energy or the concentration to do anything but look out the window and think. He didn’t want to see the thing bloom in front of him again. What scared him was letting his mother do things by herself; he thought they ought to do everything together, for a while at least, no matter how bad. He thought that sometime later they would probably try being apart. He didn’t say any of that, he only nodded, and Trudy put the truck in gear and drove them to Brentson’s Funeral Home, where he sat beside her and listened as she explained what she wanted.

IN THE HALF-LIGHT, his mother laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Breakfast,” she said.

He sat up from the sofa and rubbed his eyes.

How much did you sleep? he signed.

“A little. Come on.”

Almondine stood and stretched and followed Edgar’s mother into the kitchen. Edgar climbed the stairs to his room and dressed and looked out the window at Almondine, wandering the yard looking for a place to urinate. He walked down the stairs and stepped onto the frigid porch in his socks and pushed the door open. Overhead, a vault of watery blue, Venus and the north star captured within. Almondine backhanded a paw of powdery snow and stood three-legged, looking at him, jaw hanging gaily.