Mr. Tuten wasn’t back from work yet when I got home. Mrs. Tuten was cooking dinner. I walked into the kitchen and gave her a hug — my arm over her shoulder.

She smiled. The only other time we’d hugged was the day I found out Book and Aunt Sue had confessed and I wouldn’t have to go to court.

“Well, Iris,” she said. And that was all. But she was still smiling after I pulled my arm away.

“Anything I can do to help?” I asked.

She waggled a spoon toward the laundry room. “We’re a little past due cleaning the litter box and putting down some fresh litter. And Hob and Jill need their walk.”

Mrs. Tuten followed me into the laundry room. I scooped up some ferret pellets so she could do her inspection. She sniffed them, sifted through them with a toothpick, stabbed the toothpick through a pellet as if it were a cocktail wiener, examined it through her glasses, and then nodded her approval.

Hob kept trying to chase cats during the walk, but Jill didn’t want any part of that business, so they pulled hard in opposite directions. I needed some time away to think, though, so we did a couple of laps around the block. I couldn’t tell the Tutens about what had happened with Drunk Dennis and Donny. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Mr. DiDio, who didn’t know I’d gotten permission to take care of the goats. But how was I going to protect the goats and Gnarly? And how long could I keep up this secret life, anyway? The Tutens were nice people; they would be so hurt to find out I’d been deceiving them — no matter what my reasons, no matter how desperately I needed to save the animals. I had almost enough money to give to Aunt Sue on Thanksgiving to cover the December bills, but what about after that? It was getting colder. Fewer people would be going to the farmers’ market. One bad weekend, one rainy Saturday, one snowstorm, one power outage on the farm — a thousand things could go wrong.

Littleberry found Drunk Dennis the next day at school and hit him in the face. Drunk Dennis was a lot bigger. Littleberry got a black eye and a bruised jaw. People who saw it said that Littleberry would have kept fighting if a couple of teachers hadn’t broken it up.

I heard all about it during fourth period and rushed to find him as soon as the bell rang for lunch. He was waiting for me under the stairs.

“Are you all right?” I touched his bruised face, and he flinched.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine. They’re probably going to suspend me, though. They called my mom. She’s coming once she gets off work. I’m supposed to be going to the bathroom right now, but I wanted to see you before I go back to the office.”

I sat down next to him on the dirty floor and leaned against the wall. “I wish you hadn’t done it.”

Littleberry rubbed the back of his right hand. “I had to do something.”

“Well, you didn’t help things much,” I said. “You just got yourself beat up.”

“I hit him a couple of times.”

“Great. And now people are going to ask questions. They’re going to want to know why you got into a fight with him.”

We didn’t say anything else for a while. Littleberry wiped his palms on his jeans, then inspected them. Then he leaned against my shoulder.

“Sorry, Iris.”

I kicked at an old empty milk carton. “I guess it’s OK,” I said. “I appreciate you standing up for me. Just don’t do anything dumb like that again.”

Littleberry tried to grin, but I could tell it hurt his face.

Shirelle caught up with me after English and wanted to know about the fight.

“Dennis is telling people you pointed a gun at him, out at your farm,” she said. “What’s up with that? Is that why they got in the fight? And what the hell are you doing with a gun?”

I said I didn’t want to talk about it, but Shirelle was persistent. “We’re teammates, Iris. So tell me. If you’re in some kind of trouble, maybe I can help.”

“I can handle it,” I said. “But thanks.”

“Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. But sometimes you got to let your friends help you, and they can’t help you if they don’t know what’s going on.”

She picked up my backpack and slung it over her shoulder, then we walked down the hall together. She handed it back when we got to my locker, though she didn’t let go right away.

“Sometimes you just got to trust people, Iris,” she said. “At least a little.”

So I told her — about the deal with Aunt Sue, about hiding what I was doing from the Tutens, about Drunk Dennis and the field party and the vandalism — and about what had happened at the farm.

Shirelle was so mad, she was ready to fight Drunk Dennis and Donny herself.

“I never could stand those boys from the second I ever met them,” she said. “They’re not even first string. Donny, he’s like the water boy or something. Dennis plays on special teams, and that’s about all.”

She said she’d talk to her cousin, whose name was Tyreek. She said he played tight end on offense and linebacker on defense.

“Tyreek will definitely straighten out those boys.”

“But you just said he’s on the football team.”

“So?” Shirelle said. “They don’t all think the same way about everything, you know.”

“They don’t?”

Shirelle shook her head. “Not Tyreek. He’s no knucklehead. He went to Boys’ State last year, and you have to have the grades for that.” She rubbed her hands together. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’ll make sure Tyreek has a word with Dennis the benchwarmer and Donny the water boy.”

Littleberry was waiting for me again that afternoon, sitting on the hood of my truck.

“So?” I asked.

He threw gravel at a spare tire mounted on the back of somebody’s Jeep. “So I’m suspended for three days.”

“What did you tell them?” I asked. “About why you got in a fight.”

Littleberry blushed. “I just told them it was about a girl.”

That made me smile, even though I was still worried. “And Drunk Dennis — what did he say?”

“Same thing. I said it first, and he did his snorting thing, but then he said it, too. I guess he didn’t want them finding out he was trying to commit arson.”

I didn’t ask why Littleberry wasn’t home or how much trouble he was in with his mom. It couldn’t have been too bad if he was here waiting for me. He got into the truck before I could ask if he wanted to, and we drove out to the farm.

I did the milking and gathered the eggs and started new cheeses, then I pitchforked up old goat turds out of the barn to inspect them — the same way Mrs. Tuten examined Hob’s and Jill’s. They were all nice, round pellets, which meant everybody was OK. I’d been reading one of Aunt Sue’s goat books, and it recommended checking the goats’ eyes, too — something I remembered Dad always doing — to make sure the tissue under their eyelids was red. If it was white, that could mean the goats had parasites that were stealing nutrients out of the food they were digesting, not leaving the goats with enough for their red-blood-cell supply, making them weak and sick.

They all looked good. We wheelbarrowed the turds over to the manure pile next to the barn.

The work usually had a hypnotic effect on me, but today I stayed anxious, flinching at noises and scanning the driveway. I kept the .22 next to me while we worked and carried it along when we took the goats for another walk. Patsy and the others had been so great the day before, chasing off Dennis and Donny, that I decided to reward them by letting them forage through the woods for as long as they wanted.

We eventually made it all the way to the Devil’s Stomping Ground, and I felt relieved once we got there, sure that we were safe, that no one would find us. I hadn’t been there since the day I buried Dewey. I leaned the gun against a tree and sat next to the stones I had piled over Dewey’s grave so no animals would dig him up and so I could find him easily whenever I came back.

Littleberry sat with me at first, but after a while he got up and started hopping with Huey and Louie. They liked it when Littleberry fell down, and butted him when he tried to get up. I draped my arm around Patsy. She let me lean on her while the boys played, and we girls all watched.

Snow started falling while we were there — light flakes, not enough to bother the goats at first. I caught some on my tongue, opened my arms, and turned my face to the sky. But the peacefulness didn’t last long. The snow picked up, soon falling heavily, and the goats hated that. They huddled close to one another and maaed nervously. Gnarly whimpered and whined. So we headed back home in the darkening afternoon.

As we walked down the fading trail, I thought about a winter day last year in Maine — a day I went out with Dad in snowshoes, down by a frozen creek not far from our house. We did that every week or so to look for traps people set there illegally. If we found one, we’d take long sticks and poke the center plate to make them spring shut. We had been walking for half an hour that day when we came across a bloody patch in the snow. A trail of blood led away from the creek, and we followed it. Something struggled up ahead in the snow, and we approached slowly. It was a white fox. One of his hind legs was caught inside the jagged teeth and iron jaws of the trap, which he had dragged with him for fifty yards before he collapsed.

We couldn’t free him. Every time we got close, he snarled and lunged and tried to bite us. He couldn’t move otherwise, couldn’t crawl any farther. Blood pumped out of his leg every time his heart beat.

Dad always carried his rifle when we went out on these walks. He lifted it off his shoulder and pulled several bullets from his coat pocket and slid them into the magazine. “You should walk away now, Iris,” he said. “Let me take care of this.”

But I wouldn’t go. I stayed next to him as he aimed and fired — twice, to be sure. We freed the body together, carried the trap back home to throw in the trash, and kept the fox with our other frozen animals until later in the winter, when we built the new crematorium.

After we got back home, Dad stared out a back window, not saying much. I remembered him coughing then, and I wondered now if that was the first time I had heard the cough, or if it had been there for a while and I just hadn’t noticed before. I put my arm around his shoulder and stood there with him for a long time. I loved my dad so much right then that it made my heart ache. And now, walking home from the Devil’s Stomping Ground, I loved him so much that I almost wished my heart would stop so I wouldn’t have to feel that deep ache of love, and the bottomless ache of loss.

“You OK?” Littleberry asked after we shut the goats up in the barn and fed Gnarly and hid the gun back under the steps. We seemed to be asking each other that a lot lately.

“Yeah,” I said, because how could I even begin to explain?

He didn’t believe me, I guess, because he put his arms around me, and we did an awkward sort of hug. We stayed like that for a couple of minutes, with the snow falling harder around us, and the early winter wind picking up, until I melted, and let my head rest on his shoulder, and closed my eyes to the beautiful, terrible world.