Across the kitchen floor rippled a greenish striped snake. Adam chased it into the living room and around the picnic table. “Hey!” he shouted as it slid under one of the electric baseboards. “Hey!” he shouted again. His grandmother had been dozing in her chair but now opened her eyes. “There’s a snake in the house.”
“Oh, really?” she said, sounding unsurprised.
After much dodging and flinching, mostly on his part, he cornered the snake by the woodstove and clamped a pot over it. The same pot his mother had used to boil pasta. His grandmother watched without a word. She might have been inside the pot herself, for all the opinion she had to offer. But now what? A snake in an overturned pasta pot required an immediate solution. If only his phone weren’t dead, he could google: “What to do with a snake caught in a pot?” And something would come up, a suggestion from someone, somewhere, who’d been in this exact same situation. The snake bumped around inside the pot, making it shift from side to side as if controlled by some kind of poltergeist.
At last a plan arrived: Slide the pot across the floor to the door to the deck, prop open the door, scoot the pot onto the doorsill, and punt it.
His kick was hard and true. Both pot and snake flew high across the deck. At that precise instant, something swooped from out of nowhere and caught the snake in its talons. Holy shit! A hawk, a big, motherfucking hawk!
Away they went, off across the lake, the hawk flapping its great black wings, the snake twisting in midair. Even if this scene had been on Planet Earth, he wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, he didn’t believe it, and yet it had just happened.
“Did you see that?” he cried to his grandmother.
Asleep again in her chair. Missed the whole thing.
What a world. Every ten minutes, something new. He’d like to see his father goal-kick a snake across a lake.
IN THE KITCHEN, he poured out two mugs of black coffee and set them on a tray, alongside two slices of bread scorched on a stove burner, half a stick of hard butter, and a saucer with three slightly bruised strawberries foraged from the fruit drawer.
“Breakfast,” he announced, setting the tray on the picnic table. His grandmother woke up. Her eyes looked crossed as she swabbed at her nose with a tissue.
She wanted to drink her coffee in her chair. No toast. No strawberries. Adam opened his mouth in protest but then closed it. He’d never considered how rarely people want exactly what you want to give them; then again, this was the first meal he’d ever prepared for someone other than himself.
The coffee tasted bitter and much too strong, and as he tried to drink it, he kept thinking about Freddy alone in the woods, frightened, confused. Or lying beside the road, hit by a car, injured, panting, soft brown eyes filming over. He put his mug down.
“If Freddy shows up while I’m out looking, will you let him in?”
His grandmother blew on her coffee and didn’t answer, sunk in some deep brooding. “Remember my bird feeder,” was all she said as he stood up.
When he reached the road, he turned west and kept walking, pausing every few yards to call for Freddy, aware that it sounded like he was calling a child’s name, as if he’d lost his little brother or a kid he was babysitting. Puddles pocked the dirt road, each one a muddy little pond. Sunlight began breaking through the clouds. The rain had ushered in a tropical humidity and the road steamed. Adam pulled his T-shirt away from his chest, luffing a tiny breeze toward his chin. What had happened to all those doughnuts from yesterday? He hadn’t said he wouldn’t eat them. He was being a stretchy vegan. Why hadn’t anyone saved one for him? He was hungry and thirsty, his throat ached worse than ever, and he was trying not to admit that he’d already given up on finding Freddy who, along with the doughnuts, had entered the mysterious vortex of lost things, far outside the laws of physics.
But when he rounded a bend, he saw a hound with droopy brown ears lying beside a rusty mailbox at the end of a driveway, as if the force of his yearning for Freddy had produced a dog, just not the right one. Behind the hound, half obscured by a pine tree, stood Dennis, in his blue ball cap. He was also wearing long khaki shorts. One of his legs was a regular leg, fleshy and hairy; the other was a shiny metal prosthesis ending in a boot.
“Freddy’s run away,” Adam called out.
“So I figured,” said Dennis drily.
Adam halted at the edge of the driveway, trying not to stare at Dennis’s metal leg. It looked amazingly sci-fi: smooth, shiny, ingeniously fitted together. The rest of Dennis looked bad. The gray bags under his eyes were baggier and his beard seemed to have crawled farther up his face. He held on to the mailbox while Adam described waking up to the storm and to his grandmother’s bout of illness—omitting, out of modesty, the shower he’d given her—and then Freddy disappearing, and searching for him last night in the rain, and this morning’s discovery of a snake in the kitchen.
“She seems okay now, though,” Adam concluded. “I made her some coffee. But my mom,” he said, “still doesn’t know anything.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets, concern for his mother crowding in with all the other responsibilities he’d acquired over the past twelve hours, mixed with resentment and pride at having been left to take care of everything himself.
“It’s crazy,” he said passionately. “I mean, everything sucks.”
“Had breakfast?” asked Dennis, using his metal leg to scratch the hound’s rump with the toe of his boot.