It was the middle of the afternoon, January 1969, and a halfhearted rain dampened San Francisco and cast a gloomy pall over the hallways of the Social Welfare building. Len stood waiting for his life to change. He was a skinny man with a long face that showed its creases despite the stubble on his chin and cheeks, and he kept moving his hands from the brim of his cap to the pockets of his jeans as though he couldn’t be held responsible for what they might do if left unsupervised. Finally a door creaked open and a young woman edged into the hall.

“Sir?”

Len lurched forward. He stopped abruptly when he saw the boy. This one? He was barely a child. They’d said he was three, but Len hadn’t…were three-year-olds that tiny? Len had expected something along the lines of a good-sized calf, seventy pounds or so, take a little muscle to roll ---  but this kid would have a tough time toe-to-toe with the goose that patrolled the ragged edges of Len’s yard. Did geese hurt children?

Len said, “Hey.” He meant to sound friendly, but his voice caught in his throat and sputtered like a gas engine with a lazy spark.

The boy turned his face to him, and Len peered closely. He hadn’t seen Lisa Fay since he’d married her sister fifteen years back, but there was something of the family resemblance in the snub nose, in the delicate oval curve of the chin. There was little else that seemed delicate on this boy. In spite of his small size he was robust and muscled. His pale hair was cropped short and badly, and his corduroy pants were bunched by a belt at his waist, the elastic gone slack. Kid had the right to look bedraggled, Len thought, yanked from his mother that young. He had the right to look forlorn. This boy didn’t look forlorn, he looked ferocious.

Len cleared his throat and glanced away. The plain truth? He hadn’t wanted a kid. Had no idea, with Meg the way she was, what to do with one. This boy was too small to bring to work with him and too young to leave on his own and would probably not take kindly to being penned up all day. Len looked sideways at the young woman who had maneuvered the boy into the hall. There was no other kin to take him, she’d said. Of course, if Len preferred he be raised by strangers ---

“Do I sign something?”

Miss Hanson fl ashed him a weary smile. “Why don’t you and Wrecker take some time to get acquainted?” She gestured toward the boy. “I’ll meet you in ten minutes in the office and we can take care of the paperwork.” It was settled, then. Len took a hesitant step forward. His body was a compact knot from thirty years of working the woods, cramped worse from six hours in the truck on the drive south.

“Okay.” He grimaced upon squatting down. “All right.” Should he call him sport? Son? Fifteen years to go, and already ten minutes seemed like an eternity. He reached out his hand. It looked giant and threatening, even to him, and he slid it back into his pocket. The kid stood his ground. Battle- worn, renegade ---  Len wasn’t a praying man, but a few minutes alone in the company of this boy and it was starting to feel like something a good bit bigger than he’d bargained for. “I’m your uncle Len.”

The boy made a low sound, mixed outrage and dismay.

That about summed it up, Len thought.

Len drove north out of San Francisco and watched the city fall away behind them. He followed the line of traffic across the Presidio and over the water, gray and choppy, that flowed beneath the Golden Gate. On the far side the truck rumbled past the entrance to San Quentin Prison. Len snuck a glance sideways. The boy’s absent mother was shelved someplace like that. Lisa Fay had been sentenced for so long to the state slammer that they might as well have thrown away the key. Len frowned, and his fingers itched for a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked in years, but it had been a very long day.

A muffled snore escaped from the boy, and Len risked a look in his direction. Wrecker. What kind of a name was that? Slumped against the door with his neck bent at an unnatural angle and his short legs jammed straight out on the seat. Len shifted his grip on the wheel and blinked his gaze forward. The highway buckled into green hills between each sleepy little town. Two hours down, now, and they still had four to go, a hundred miles north on narrow roads before they turned and threaded night-blind through the giant trees, up and down the winding mountain nearly to the sea. When the few buildings of Cloverdale loomed ahead, Len pulled in and parked in the lot of a diner. He was too weary to make a straight shot of it. “Boy?” Len said, and reached a big hand to jiggle the kid’s shoulder. Wrecker. It would take some getting used to.

“You want something to eat?”

Wrecker blinked a few times and reached a hand to wipe away the spit that dampened his cheek. Len hadn’t noticed the boy’s blue eyes before. Stormy. The color of sea-squall, not clear sky. “I have to pee.”

“Pee? Oh.” Len wrinkled his forehead. “That.” He got out of the truck and crossed to the other door and unbuckled Wrecker and lifted him down, and they stood there awkwardly for a moment, while Len wondered if he should carry the boy, or take his hand, or simply walk ahead and hope he would follow. He had settled on the last when the door to the diner flapped open and two men and a woman walked out.

Len sagged. Four hours from home, and his Mattole neighbors were marching straight at him. Charlie Burrell bleated a greeting, and his wife moved in to lay a sympathetic hand on Len’s elbow.

“Hullo, dear,” she said. Greta was a decent woman with a face as broad and bland as a saucer. “How’s Meg?” Len’s gaze swerved aground. Six months had passed since his wife had gone in for a root canal and come home with an infection that spread into her brain and rampaged like a wild beast. Penicillin saved her life, but it couldn’t save her mind. “Meg?” Len answered gruffly, glancing back up. “Meg’s fine.” The same, he clarified. The doctors didn’t think she’d change much from how she was now.

Charlie shuffled and grunted. “Hell of a thing,” he mumbled. He glanced at his wife, and his voice veered toward belligerence. They’d had some news. “Junior got his draft notice,” he announced. The son, thick and sullen, stood behind and pretended deafness. “I believe he’ll go, but Greta here…” Len watched the woman’s lips tighten and her body inch away from her husband’s. She kept her gaze trained on a spot just past Len’s shoulder, and answered in clipped tones. Their neighbor had troubles of his own without them burdening him with theirs, Greta said. She flashed Len a quick glance, and her voice softened slightly. He should take care of himself, now. She would stop over to see Meg soon. Len nodded. He breathed out as they left. He settled his cap back on his head, paused a moment to reset his balance, and remembered the boy.

 “Wrecker?”

Len circled the truck and scanned the parking lot.

“Kid?” He called twice, his voice tight and low. He swung his head toward the road to make sure the boy wasn’t trapped in traffic, and then he hurried across the lot at awkward angles, checking between the cars. Len rushed inside and anxiously searched the faces. A boy, he stammered, taking hold of the waitress. Had she seen him? A little one. His eyes lit on a stool at the counter.

“Maybe this tall.”

“Whoa, there,” she said, steadying him. “You lost your kid?”

She studied Len’s panicked face and then turned to the diners.

“Any y’all seen this man’s boy? ’Bout yay high.” She gestured to her hip and then turned back to Len. “How old?” Her eyes widened.

“Good God. Get looking,” she shouted. “Three years old and on the loose. Spread out,” and the people left their napkins by their plates and did as she ordered. “Norton,” she yelled to the cook. He came out wiping his hands on the dingy apron that girdled his body. “Check down by the river. And fast.”

Len felt his heart seize. If anything had happened to the boy ---

“You set there,” the waitress said. She placed a hand on his shoulder and forced him into the cracked padding of a booth.

“You look like death. Can’t have him see you like that,” and Len felt himself collapse under her soft push. The room emptied. Len counted slowly to five, forcing each breath into his lungs. And then he stood and followed the cook’s broad back down a path to the river. He paused when Norton did, watched the cook straighten from his bearlike slump, tap a cigarette loose from a crumpled pack, hold it to his mouth. Norton leisurely cupped his hands to light the cigarette and drew a noisy, satisfi ed lungful of smoke.

Len strained to see past the brush that blocked his view.

Wrecker stood on a boulder not ten paces away, throwing smaller rocks into the swiftly fl owing stream. He had a powerful overhand and imperfect aim. Norton ignored the kid and smoked with gusto. Then he snubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe, tossed the butt into the bushes, and roared, “All right, Champ. Come on with me.”

Len watched Wrecker lift his chin and glance at the fat man in the apron. His gaze swept around to gather Len as well. He kept throwing his rocks into the water.

Norton tapped his foot. “You want a cheeseburger?” he bribed. “I can make you a cheeseburger.”

The boy didn’t stir, and Norton yawned, his mouth opening wide as a walrus’s. “Fine,” he said, unperturbed. “Hide out down here and eat these weeds. It’s all the same to me.” He started back up the trail. “Hold your nose when you chew on them,” Norton shouted helpfully. “Helps cover the fi sh shit.”

Wrecker held on to the rest of his pebbles. “Fish don’t shit.” Len lifted an eyebrow. He hadn’t been raised to use language like that. Hadn’t been raised to wander off, either. Norton snorted. “Don’t kid yourself.” He spit out of the corner of his mouth. “Everybody shits. You get hungry, come on up,” and lumbered past Len back up the trail to the diner. Wrecker threw the rest of his rocks, one by one, into the fl ow. Then he turned and followed the heavyset cook back to the diner.

Len couldn’t eat. He watched the boy tuck into his burger, kneeling on the booth seat to be tall enough to reach the table, and thought, Oh. What in the world have I done. It was half past ten when Len made his careful way at last down to the Mattole. He felt happiness swell a lump into his throat. Every part of him ached and his mind was frozen with fatigue, but he’d made it home.

The Mattole Valley lay nestled in the rain-soaked western reaches of Humboldt County. It was a bump high on the California coast that jutted into the Pacifi c and sheltered bear and mountain lion in a kind of sleepy, soggy paradise of the ages. Sure, Len thought. Until the nineteenth century roared in. He’d read his history. That was a new age, a freight train fueled with the promise of fortune, and lumber barons and oil drillers and commercial fi shermen and cattle ranchers caught wind of a fi ne opportunity and came to gather what they could of the rewards. By the time Len and Meg arrived in ’55, the biggest trees had been felled and the oil played out and what was left was just enough range to run a few hundred head of cows. The river rose in ’56, wiped whole towns off the map. Nobody was getting rich anymore.

That suited Len fine. He came looking for remote and he found it, a sweet little forty- acre spread at the end of a dirt road the county quit fixing after the fi rst ranch and behind four gates he had to get out and open, move the truck through, then climb back out and shut to keep the cattle from wandering off their range. He didn’t keep cows, himself. Couldn’t abide them. He had a hunting rifle his father gave him when he left Tennessee twenty-odd years before, and he rarely had to go farther than his own wood lot to bring down a deer. One animal would keep them through the winter, and one more let him trade with the fishermen up in Eureka. Every summer Meg kept a garden, and Len had his cordwood business and the little lumber mill to bring in some cash. Of course, that was when Meg had been well. Len felt the worry squeeze the box of his ribs. This was the fi rst time he’d been out past dark since her accident.

The third gate was Bow Farm, and Len eased down to push the rickety thing aside. He peered down the rutted track that led to the farm house. There’d been stories of trespassers chased off the land by women bearing shotguns. In the stories they were always big women. Big shotguns. Len had lived next door long enough to have figured out that the girls weren’t all that big, or half as threatening. They weren’t nuns, or Amish, or cult members, or all sisters with widely ranging fathers, as the rumors had variously claimed ---  and since the tree hugger had joined them, one of them was a man. Len had to hand it to them. Nobody thought they’d stick, coming up here from the city, paying too much for that run-down spread. It was too hard a life. Too wet in the winter and hot in the summer, too many earthquakes and landslides and wild animals who shrieked and snarled in the night.

But they were into their third wet season, Willow and the others, and they had saved him, in a way. He didn’t know if he could have borne the heartbreak of Meg’s decline without their help.

The fourth gate, left open when he pulled out that morning, was his own. A single light on in the house poured its yellow into the yard. Len opened the truck door and smelled the wet dripping off the trees. Everything was damped- down and quiet. The road quit here in his driveway. Past that were dark trees and steep hillsides and a five-mile hike to the sea.

Len hadn’t told anyone quite where he’d gone, or why. He’d asked Willow to stay with Meg until he got back, and he could see her sitting at the kitchen table, her back to the door. He glanced sideways to make sure the kid was asleep but caught sight of the boy’s round face, his open eyes. Len swore slightly under his breath.

He couldn’t count on this one to stay put. He crossed around the front of the truck to the passenger side, scooped the boy against his chest, and carried him like a loose sack of grain into the house.

Willow lifted her head to greet him. She cut an elegant fi gure, with her honey hair swept up like a movie star’s, her pearl earrings, those fl at shoes that made her feet look dainty --- not the clodhopper boots Ruth and that Melody girl favored. She was the only one of the bunch to put on lipstick, and anyone could tell she wore a bra. Not that Len was looking.

Not exactly. He met her gaze and brushed past Willow to lay the sleeping boy onto the couch by the wood stove. Then he crossed the floor, boards squeaking underfoot, to find his wife asleep in the single bedroom. Meg’s face in the muted light was peacefully asleep. Len felt a wave of love and revulsion. It was easy to confuse Meg’s new blankness with peace, but blank was blank. Blank was blank was blank.

If the old Meg was trapped in there, Len had no way to get her out. The old Meg was peaceful. She had never talked much but there had been a calm, an ease to her that Len felt comfortable to be around. She was competent and even-tempered and had a way of running a hand under his shirt and up his spine that tingled the base of his brain and made him yearn, without reason, for the chill and tart fl avor of raspberry sherbet. She had always been a modest woman, and now, quite simply, she was not. Len did his best to satisfy her but for him the plea sure had gone out of that part of his life. He felt for the wedding band on his left hand. Fifteen years grown into the flesh of his fi nger, they would have to cut his hand to get it off .

Though why would they. There was no need. Len and Meg. Meg and Len. Even their names were similar, brief and to the point, the consonants crowding the short e. Len. Bed. Meg. Fed. Pen. Leg. Red.

Dead, he thought, and turned back to the other room. Willow had her coat on, black wool with the high collar. She had draped the couch throw over the boy and tucked in its edges and was watching him intently, her slender hand stroking the soft blond of his hair. She looked up when Len entered, and he winced at the look on her face. That delicate, quizzical smile.

Len was helpless to answer. The letter had come from the state some weeks ago, and it sat on the kitchen table for days, yielding less and less to each reading until he couldn’t even tell what they wanted, much less what he should do about it. But Len had gassed up the truck and drove the six hours to find out. He held Willow’s gaze and then broke from it to turn a bewildered eye toward the boy. That was what he’d brought back. That one, there, inert and lying quiet on the couch. It was all the answer he could give. “It’s late, Willow. I could drive you home.”

She smiled and shook her head. Her yurt behind Bow Farm was an easy walk away. “I’ll see you, Len.”

“All right, then.”

The open door let in a gust of night air. Len went to the closet and drew out an extra blanket and opened it over the boy, and then he went in to the bedroom and lay down beside his wife and fought for sleep.

Excerpted from Wrecker © Copyright 2012 by Summer Wood. Reprinted with permission by Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved.