*

The men in the office go through what has to be done, coldly and dispassionately, as if they were talking about replacing a piece of furniture. In the old team photograph, Peter Andersson is standing in the middle; he was team captain then, GM now. It’s the perfect success story—the men in the room know the importance of building up that sort of mythology for the media as well as the fans. Next to Peter in the photograph stands Sune, the A-team coach, who persuaded Peter to move home from Canada with his family after his career as a professional player came to an end. The pair of them rebuilt the youth team with the ambition of one day having the best junior team in the country. Everyone laughed back then, but no one’s laughing now. Tomorrow those juniors are playing a semifinal game, and next year Kevin Erdahl and a few of the others will be moving up to the A-team, the sponsors will pile millions into the club, and their challenge to get back to the elite will begin in earnest. And that wouldn’t have happened without Peter, who has always been Sune’s best pupil.

One of the sponsors looks at his watch irritably.

“Shouldn’t he be here by now?”

The president’s phone slips between his sweaty fingers.

“I’m sure he’s on his way. He’s probably dropping the kids off at school.”

The sponsor gives him a condescending smile. “Has his lawyer wife got a more important meeting than him, as usual? Is this a job or a hobby for Peter?”

One of the board members clears his throat and says, partly in jest and partly not, “We need a GM with steel-toed boots. Not slippers.”

The sponsor smiles and suggests, “Maybe we should employ his wife instead? A GM with sharp stilettos would work pretty well, wouldn’t it?” The men in the room laugh. It echoes, all the way to the high ceilings.

*

Peter heads for the kitchen in search of his wife, but finds his daughter’s best friend, Ana, instead. She’s making a smoothie. Or at least he thinks she is, because the whole countertop is covered with an evil pink sludge that’s oozing steadily toward the edge, preparing to attack, conquer, and annex the parquet floor. Ana takes her headphones off.

“Good morning! Your blender’s super-complicated!”

Peter takes a deep breath.

“Hello, Ana. You’re here . . . early.”

“No, I slept over,” she replies breezily.

“Again? That makes . . . four nights in a row now?”

“I haven’t been keeping count.”

“No. So I see. Thanks. But don’t you think it might be time to go home one evening and . . . I don’t know . . . get some fresh clothes from your own closet or something?”

“Don’t have to worry about that. I’ve got pretty much all my clothes here anyway.”

Peter massages the back of his neck and really does try to look as delighted at this as Ana does.

“That’s . . . just great. But won’t your dad be missing you?”

“No worries. We talk a lot on the phone and stuff.”

“Yes, of course. But I suppose you’ll have to go home one day and sleep in your own bed? Maybe?”

Ana forces rather too many unidentifiable frozen berries and pieces of fruit into the blender and stares at him in surprise.

“Okay. But that’s going to be seriously complicated now that all my clothes are here, isn’t it?”

Peter stands motionless for a long while, just looking at her. Then she switches on the blender without putting the lid on first. Peter turns and goes out into the hall, and yells with rapidly increasing desperation: “DARLING!”

*

Maya is still lying on her bed, slowly picking at the strings of the guitar and letting the notes bounce off the walls and ceiling until they dissolve into nothingness. Tiny, desolate cries for company. She hears Ana on the rampage in the kitchen, she hears her frustrated parents push past each other in the hall, her dad barely awake and vaguely surprised, as if every morning he wakes up somewhere he’s never been before, and her mom with the body language of a remote-controlled lawn mower whose obstacle-sensor has broken.

*

Her name is Kira, but she’s never heard anyone in Beartown say that. In the end she just gave up and let them call her “Kia.” People are so sparing with their words here that they don’t even seem to want to waste consonants. Back at the start Kira used to entertain herself by saying “You mean Pete?” whenever anyone in town asked after her husband. But they all used to look at her so seriously and repeat, “No, Peter!” Like everything else, irony freezes here. So now Kira merely amuses herself by noting that her children have names that demonstrate an exemplary economy with consonants, Leo and Maya, to stop anyone’s head exploding at the council registry office.

She moves through the little house with practiced movements, getting dressed and drinking coffee simultaneously as she progresses ever onward through the bathroom, hall, and kitchen. She picks up a sweater from her daughter’s bedroom floor in passing and folds it in one fluid motion without for a moment interrupting her exhortations that it’s time to put the guitar down and get up.

“Go and have a shower; you smell like you and Ana set the room on fire and tried to put it out with Red Bull. Dad’s driving you to school in twenty minutes.”

Maya rolls out from under the comforter, reluctant but wise from experience. Her mom isn’t the sort you argue with; her mom is a lawyer, and she never quite stops being one.

“Dad said you were driving us to school.”

“Dad has been misinformed. And will you please ask Ana to clean the kitchen when she’s finished making her smoothie? I love her dearly, she’s your best friend, I don’t care if she sleeps here more often than she sleeps at home, but if she’s going to make smoothies in our kitchen she’s going to have to learn to put the lid on the blender, and you need to teach her at least the most basic functions of a damned dishcloth. Okay?”

Maya leans the guitar against the wall and heads toward the bathroom, and when her back is turned she rolls her eyes so far that an X-ray would have confused her pupils with kidneys.

“And don’t you roll your eyes at me. I can see you doing it even if I can’t see you doing it,” her mom snarls.

“Speculation and hearsay,” her daughter mutters.

“I’ve told you, people only say that on television,” her mom retorts.

Her daughter responds by closing the bathroom door with unnecessary force. Peter is yelling “Darling!!!” from somewhere in the house. Kira picks up yet another sweater from the floor and hears Ana exclaim, “Oh, hell,” just before she redecorates the kitchen ceiling with smoothie.

“I could have done something else with my life, you know,” Kira says quietly to no one at all as she slips the keys to the Volvo into her jacket pocket.