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“Well, I wasn’t expecting to be caught shirtless today, so…”
“Sorry.” Nova turned away quickly, her gaze on the other room, but she remained in the doorway. “Do you know how to cook?”
“I used to, but I honestly haven’t really used any culinary skills over the past few years beyond roasting it over the fire or opening a can,” I said.
“That’ll do. Get dressed and meet me in the kitchen.”
After I pulled on my shirt, I hobbled out to join her. Several large potatoes and two mason jars of mixed carrots, onions, and green beans were on the table, along with a sharp knife. A large pot was boiling on the stove top, and Nova was adding a bit of dried herbs to it.
“We’re making a forever stew to last us a few days,” she said as I approached. “It’ll free up our time for other things.”
“Forever stew?” I asked.
“It’s a stew that’s always going, with vegetables and water added as it runs out.” She was at the counter with a thick slab of red meat, and using a knife, she pointed toward the kitchen chair. “You can sit at the table and dice up the vegetables. I’ll handle the meat.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, taking my own knife and the cutting board, while Nova worked at the counter with her back to me.
“What about you?” I asked. “Did you cook a lot before?”
“Yeah, I did,” she said at length. “My grandma raised me and my older sister, and Sage was always the smart one and busy with school. Me and Nana were always in the kitchen.”
“So it wasn’t as much of an adjustment for you when things changed,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “The hardest thing has been cutting down Nana’s family recipes designed to feed a dozen people when it hasn’t been that many in a very, very long time.”
“Did you grow up on a farm?”
“I grew up on the Canim Lake Reserve. My mom and Nana were of the Tsq'escenemc tribe,” Nova revealed. “My father and his mother were not, and it was his mother that left me this house. That was after Nana had passed, long after both my parents had died, and after Sage had left for school. There wasn’t much left for me on the reserve, so I came out here.”
“That sounds like a very interesting childhood,” I said. “I grew up a city boy, very basic middleclass apartment life. So I was ill-prepared for all of this.”
“What did you do before? Were you an artist?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I replied, because I didn’t like talking about music or fame or any of that anymore.
Nova glanced back over her shoulder at me. “Who did the sketchbook belong to?”
“How do you know it isn’t mine?” I asked.
“The way the pictures were drawn, and the fact that they were all signed Harlow Smith, and you told me your name is Lazlo.”
“Harlow was…” Her name stuck in my throat, and I swallowed it down. “She was like a little sister to me. We found each other in the mess of all this, and we took care of one another. Until I couldn’t… and I ended up here, and she didn’t.”
Nova’s voice was uncharacteristically soft when she said, “The apocalypse isn’t kind to anyone.”
“What about your sister?” I asked, because it still hurt too much talking about Harlow.
“She was smarter than me, but she wasn’t smart enough,” Nova said, sounding both proud and disappointed at the same time. “If you’re done with chopping that, we should probably move onto the hardest part of your life here.”
I held the knife a bit tighter in my hand. “And what’s that?”
“Meeting the wolfdogs.”
16
Lazlo
Nova always called them wolfdogs, and I believed that was true, but when I watched them walk in tandem across the yard, they were wolves.
