Free Still Life with Shape-shifter by Sharon Shinn Page B

there to be some repercussions in the morning when my mother couldn’t find the hamburger in the refrigerator, but I was lucky. She’d been too drunk to remember she’d taken it out of the freezer to thaw, so she spent most of the breakfast hour slamming through the kitchen, swearing under her breath and demanding what she was going to make for dinner. She had the Crock-Pot out, and a few cans of tomatoes and beans, so I supposed she’d planned to have chili stewing all day.
    “I’m going to get home late,” she fumed, “and your father will be hungry.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll stop at the store after school and pick up something to make. Just give me money.”
    You never had to persuade my mother to accept help. She always closed with you on the first offer. “That would be great. Here’s a twenty, is that enough?”
    “I guess. Unless you want me to get milk and cereal and other stuff, too.”
    “All right. Thirty bucks. But I’m not going to the store again until Saturday, so you better make it count.”
    “Okay.”
    I knew how to stretch a dollar—I’d learned
that
lesson during the lean days in Iowa. So I stopped at the discount supermarket instead of the upscale one, where my mother preferred to shop these days, now that she and my dad both had jobs, and there was a decent amount of money coming in. I bought two deluxe family packs of hamburger, five pounds each. I knew I could rewrap them and stuff them in the back of the freezer, and my parents would never realize they were there. I picked up a bag of dog food, too, though I used my own money to buy it since it would have eaten up a huge chunk of my limited budget. I reasoned that a starving wolf wouldn’t be too picky, and if the meal was good enough for a dog, it probably wouldn’t hurt a wolf. More Neosporin, more gauze, a few apples, some bread, and I had my supplies for the week.
    Though half of me believed I would never see the wolf again.
    And all of me hoped I would see him that very night.
    *   *   *
    D inner was an utterly silent meal, an improvement over the shouting of the night before, but the air-conditioning still wasn’t working, so the house was miserable. My father left with a muttered explanation about playing poker with the boys. My mother took a romance paperback and a bottle of Riesling to the upstairs bathroom, where I heard her draw water for a cool bath. I knew from experience she could soak in the water for more than an hour; sometimes she even fell asleep in the tub. I often worried that she would slip too low against the porcelain and drown, too wasted to fight her way clear of the water. I would check on her several times in the next sixty minutes to make sure she was still alive.
    But while no one else was around, I had a chance to lug the twenty-pound bag of dog food out to the edge of the property. We lived in a small town that crouched on both sides of Highway 55 as it wound its long, monotonous way from Chicago to St. Louis. Most of this part of Illinois was filled with croplands, and the undomesticated areas were mainly given over to prairie grasses, scrubby trees, and the marshy lands that developed around meandering creeks that flooded every spring. But our neighborhood opened up onto a few acres of woods and underbrush that folded into short, rocky hills—not the best farmland, and not good for much else, either. “It’s a fucking wildlife preserve out here,” my father had snarled when the raccoons and possums and squirrels began parading through the yard during our first month in the house. But my mother and I liked to watch the animals hunt for food or chase each other through mating season. She bought a book about identifying birds, though I think she only opened it once or twice, when she was sitting on the back porch and sipping a glass of wine. I was the one who put out stale bread in the fall and birdseed in the winter—and now I was the one to put out wolf-feed in the