A fine and bitter snow by Dana Stabenow

them up and jammed them on the hook again. This time, they stayed.
     
    "I was about to make some cocoa."
     
    "I'd like that. It was a long ride home."
     
    Ethan turned to the kettle. "What were you doing up at the old gals' place?"
     
    "I went there to ask them to help with Dan."
     
    "Ah." He was silent for a moment, measuring cocoa and honey and evaporated milk into three mugs. "I wasn't expecting you to charge off that way this morning when I came galloping over with the news."
     
    Kate raised one shoulder. "He's a friend."
     
    "Urn." He brought her a mug. It had miniature marsh-mallows in it. She repressed a shudder.
     
    He gave a second mug to Johnny, who grunted a thank-you without looking up, and came back to sit next to where she was curled up on the couch. He stretched out his long legs and propped his feet on the burl-wood coffee table, about the only piece of furniture in the room that had any pretension to style. "What did Dina and Ruthe have to say?"
     
    "Well, they weren't surprised. They said the current administration wants to drill for oil in the Arctic, and it follows that they—the administration—will try to get rid of every bureaucrat who thinks otherwise."
     
    "They don't have the votes in Congress, do they?"
     
    "Ruthe says they don't." Kate tried to drink some cocoa without allowing her lips to come into contact with the marshmallows. It wasn't easy. "But I don't think she or Dina have a lot of confidence that the situation is going to stay that way."
     
    "You for it or against it?"
     
    "What? Drilling in ANWR?" Kate thought about it. "I don't know. I've gone back and forth on it. I've been to Prudhoe Bay; they did a good job there. Then I think of Valdez, and how badly they did there. And then I think—" She stopped.
     
    "What?"
     
    "Well . . . well, it's just that maybe, once in a while, we should let a beautiful thing be, you know?" She looked at him. "What else is left like that?" She looked at Johnny, still hunched over his homework. "What do we leave behind when we're gone if we move into it now with D-nines?"
     
    Ethan finished his chocolate. "I'm for it."
     
    "You're for drilling?"
     
    "Yeah. There'll be jobs, Kate. It's easy for you to say let it be, but I've got kids to support and educate."
     
    "Your father raised four sons single-handedly before there was an oil patch."
     
    "I'm not my father."
     
    They were both angry, both aware of it, and both made a conscious decision to pull back from that anger. Ethan leaned forward to place his mug on the coffee table. "Where'd you get this table, anyway?"
     
    "Buck Brinker made it for Emaa," she said. "I brought it home when she died."
     
    "Thought I recognized the work. Nice piece."
     
    "I like it. What did you do today?"
     
    "Chopped wood."
     
    "Filled up your woodshed?"
     
    "Nope." He stretched, his joints popping, and gave her a lazy grin. "Filled yours."
     
    "Oh. Ah. Well. Thanks."
     
    "Thank me later."
     
    She gave Johnny's back a warning glance.
     
    Ethan's grin faded. "We've got to talk about this, Kate."
     
    "Not now."
     
    "It's always 'Not now.' When?"
     
    Johnny sat up and closed his book with a decisive thump. "There!" He swiveled in his chair. "Done!" He fixed Kate with a hopeful eye.
     
    "What?" she said.
     
    He looked at the guitar.
     
    So did she. Dust lay over it like a shroud.
     
    "You said you would," Johnny said.
     
    "I know I did," Kate said, reflecting on the unwisdom of making promises to adolescents. They were worse than elephants. It never occurred to her to renege, though. She set her mug next to Ethan's and got to her feet, ignoring the stifled sigh she heard Ethan give.
     
    The guitar was an old Gibson that had belonged to Kate's father, who had left it behind when he died, along with an extensive collection of folk songs from the fifties, some with musical notation, some with only the chords penciled in over the stanzas, some just with the lyrics scribbled on a page torn from a