Athena barks. Mrs. Boydstun says, “Can you please shut that beast up?”

Zeno says, “Can we go home now, Papa?”

“Whatever is asked of us,” the president’s wife continues, “I am sure we can accomplish it.”

Papa shakes his head. “These boys have their faces blown off at breakfasts. They burns alives.”

Athena barks again and Mrs. Boydstun clenches her forehead with trembling hands and the hundreds of porcelain children on their shelves—holding hands, jumping rope, carrying pails—seem suddenly charged with a terrible power.

“Now,” says the radio, “we will go back to the program we had arranged for the night.”

Papa says, “We will shows these Jap fuck-fuckers. Boys oh boys we will shows them.”

Five days later he and four other men from the sawmill ride to Boise to have their teeth counted and their chests measured. And on the day after Christmas Papa is on his way to something called boot camp somewhere called Massachusetts and Zeno is living with Mrs. Boydstun.

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

2002–2011

Seymour

As a newborn, he screeches, howls, bawls. As a toddler, he will eat only circles: Cheerios, freezer waffles, and plain M&M’s from a 1.69-ounce package. No Fun Size, no Sharing Size, God help Bunny if she offers him Peanut. She can touch his arms and legs but not his feet or hands. Never his ears. Shampooing is a nightmare. Haircuts = impossible.

Home is a weekly motel in Lewiston called the Golden Oak; she pays for her one room by cleaning the other sixteen. Boyfriends roll through like storms: there’s Jed, there’s Mike Gawtry, there’s a guy Bunny calls Turkey Leg. Lighters flick; ice machines grumble; logging trucks rattle the windows. On the worst nights they sleep in the Pontiac.

At three, Seymour decides he cannot abide the tags on any of his underwear, nor the rustling certain breakfast cereals make against the interiors of their plastic bags. At four, he shrieks if the straw in a juice box rubs the wrong way against the foil it has been struck through. If she sneezes too loudly, he trembles for half an hour. Men say, “What’s wrong with him?” They say, “Can’t you shut him up?”

He’s six when Bunny learns that her great-uncle Pawpaw, a man she has not seen in twenty years, has died and left her his manufactured double-wide in Lakeport. She closes her flip phone, drops her rubber gloves in the tub of Room 14, abandons her cleaning cart in the half-open doorway, loads the Grand Am with the toaster oven, the Magnavox DVD all-in-one, and two trash bags of clothes, and drives Seymour three hours south without stopping once.

The house sits on an acre of weeds a mile from town at the dead end of a gravel road called Arcady Lane. One window is shattered, the siding has I DONT CALL 911 spray-painted on it, and the roof curls upward at one end as though a giant has tried to peel it off. As soon as the lawyer drives away, Bunny kneels in the driveway and sobs with a persistence that frightens them both.

Pine forest wraps the acre on three sides. Thousands of white butterflies drift between the heads of the thistles in the yard. Seymour sits beside her.

“Oh, Possum.” Bunny wipes her eyes. “It’s just been a long fucking time.”

The trees rising above the back of the property shimmer; the butterflies float.

“Since what, Mom?”

“Since hope.”

A strand of spiderweb, sailing through the air, catches the light. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s been a long fucking time since hope.” And is startled when his mother bursts into laughter.

* * *

Bunny nails plywood over the broken window and wipes rodent turds out of the kitchen cabinets and drags Pawpaw’s chipmunk-chewed mattress to the road and finances two new ones at nineteen-percent-no-money-down. At the thrift store she finds an orange love seat and douses it with half a can of Glade Hawaiian Breeze before she and Seymour drag it inside. At sunset they sit side by side on the front step and eat two waffles each. An osprey passes high above, heading for the lake. A doe and two fawns materialize beside the toolshed and twitch their ears. The sky turns purple.

“Seed’s a-growing,” sings Bunny, “and the meadow’s a-blooming, and the wood’s a-coming into leaf now…”

Seymour shuts his eyes. The breeze feels as soft as the blue blankets at the Golden Oak, maybe softer, and the thistles are pumping off a smell like warm Christmas trees, and through the wall directly behind them is his very own room with stains on the ceiling that look like clouds or cougars or maybe sea sponges, and his mother sounds so happy that when she gets to the part in her song about the ewe bleating, and the bullock prancing, and the billy goat farting, he can’t keep himself from laughing.

* * *

First grade at Lakeport Elementary = twenty-six six-year-olds in a twenty-four-by-forty-foot portable presided over by a seasoned ironist named Mrs. Onegin. The navy-blue desk she assigns to Seymour is hateful: its frame is warped and its bolts are rusted and its feet make squeaks against the floor that feel like needles perforating the backs of his eyeballs.

Mrs. Onegin says, “Seymour, do you see any other children sitting on the floor?”

She says, “Seymour, are you waiting for a specially engraved invitation?”

She says, “Seymour, if you don’t sit—”

On the principal’s desk, a mug says, SMILING IS MY FAVORITE. Cartoon roadrunners jog across his belt. Bunny is wearing her brand-new Wagon Wheel Custodial Services polo, cost to be deducted from her first paycheck. She says, “He’s pretty sensitive,” and Principal Jenkins says, “Is there a father figure?” and glances for a third time at her breasts, and later, in the car, Bunny pulls onto the shoulder of Mission Street and dry-swallows three Excedrin.

“Possum, are you listening? Touch your ears if you’re listening.”

Four trucks whizz past: two blue, two black. He touches his ears.

“What are we?”

“A team.”

“And what does a team do?”

“Helps each other.”

A red car passes. Then a white truck.

“Can you look at me?”

He looks. The magnetized name-tag clipped to her shirt says, HOUSEKEEPING ATTENDANT BUNNY. Her name is smaller than her job. Two more trucks rock the Grand Am as they pass but he cannot hear what color they are.

“I can’t leave work in the middle of a shift because you don’t like your desk. They’ll fire me. And I can’t get fired. I need you to try. Will you try?”

* * *

He tries. When Carmen Hormaechea touches him with her poison ivy arm, he tries not to scream. When Tony Molinari’s Aerobie hits him in the side of the head, he tries not to cry. But nine days into September, a wildfire in the Seven Devils chokes the whole valley with smoke, and Mrs. Onegin says the air quality is too low for outside recess, and they’ll need to keep the windows closed because of Rodrigo’s asthma, and within minutes the portable reeks like Pawpaw’s microwave when Bunny defrosts a freezer fajita.

Seymour makes it through Group Math, through Lunch, through Fluency Tubs. But by Reflection Time, his endurance is fracturing. Mrs. Onegin sends everyone to their desks to color their North Americas, and Seymour tries to draw faint green circles in the Gulf of Mexico, tries to move only his hand and wrist, not shifting so the desk frame doesn’t go screek screek, not breathing so he doesn’t smell any smells, but sweat is trickling down his ribs, and Wesley Ohman keeps opening and closing the Velcro on his left shoe, and Tony Molinari’s lips are going poppoppop, and Mrs. Onegin is writing a huge, terrible A-M-E-R-I-C- on the whiteboard, the marker tip rasping and squeaking, the classroom clock ticktickticking, and all these sounds race into his head like hornets into a nest.