The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow

end.”
    He dropped his eyes, blue eyes so like his father's. “I didn't ask permission,” he muttered, and Kate had visions of him wriggling through patches of dense undergrowth peopled by bears and wolves and moose.
    “Anyway, Mom's dumb, but she's not so dumb that she wouldn't know where to start looking.”
    “She's your mother, Johnny. You will speak of her with respect.”
    He was fourteen years old. He'd lost a father he worshipped a year before, and had turned his back on a mother he barely tolerated when he'd left his new home without permission two months before, to show up on Kate's doorstep asking for—what exactly? she wondered now. A different mother? A home? Sanctuary?
    “ I'm no mommy ,” she remembered telling Jack once, and she still wasn't. But she also remembered Jack saying to her, “Look out for Johnny for me” as he lay dying in her arms.
    “I hate Outside, Kate,” Johnny said in a low voice. He raised defiant eyes. “And I hate Mom for taking me there when I didn't want to go. She knew I didn't want to; I told her. And she made me go anyway.”
    She looked at him and she saw herself as a child, as aware, as determined, and younger than he was. When her parents had died, her grandmother had taken her to live in Niniltna. After one week of city life, Kate rose early one morning that December and walked the twenty-five miles from the village to the homestead, armed with the little .22 rifle her father had bought her and carrying half a loaf of Ekaterina's homemade bread. There ensued a battle of wills between grandmother and grandchild the echoes of which still reverberated around the Park, and which resulted in Kate moving in with a crusty old widower with four sons, who had the virtue of owning the homestead next to Kate's father's. Abel Int-Hout wasn't a tender or a loving man, but he was a decent and a capable one, and his, for lack of a better word, “stewardship” of Kate allowed her to spend much more time at home than she would have been able to living in town. It had also continued the lessons in self-sufficiency begun by her father when she had begun to walk.
    Town in this case amounted to a couple of dozen buildings, a store, a school, an earth station, and a permanent population of four hundred three, which included the dogs. Home in this case meant the one-room cabin she and Johnny were standing in and a semicircle of outbuildings sitting on the bank of a creek that ran through the heart of the Park. Step out in any direction and you'd run into a grizzly before you ran into another human being. Kate liked it that way.
    She looked at Jack's son, and said, “I don't want to go away, Johnny. I have to.” She shook her head when he opened his mouth to speak again. “If you want to stay here, we have to hire an attorney and work out some kind of custodial arrangement. That takes money. This job will take a month, at most two. No longer than the election.”
    Two months in the life of a fourteen-year-old was an eternity. “You don't want me here at all,” he said.
    “No, Johnny, I—”
    “You don't care about me,” his tone rough. “You probably didn't care for him, either. You practically got him killed!”
    His eyes were swimming. Kate took a deep breath and didn't make the mistake of offering an embrace that would undoubtedly be rejected out of hand and which might even spur flight. She had no wish to go chasing through the forest that started on her doorstep after a young man who was too upset to remember any of the survival skills she'd taught him over a series of summer weekends during the last three years.
    It wasn't the first time he'd accused her of killing his father. It wouldn't be the last time she didn't deny it. Jack had been at George Perry's hunting lodge because she had been there, plain and simple. She didn't blame herself, exactly, at least not anymore, for his death, but she didn't, couldn't, wouldn't duck out of what she was responsible for, either. Jack