Excerpt from Saints of the Household by Ari Tison, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Why didn't you stop? Why did you kick him in the face? You broke his nose.

Which one of us broke his nose? Do we even remember?

His face is severely injured.

What can we say? We are sorry; we will never do it again?

We are angry, we finally say. This is true.

But we don't know why. This is not true.


WALK HOME


With hands on our backpack straps, we laugh at the small, ratty dog barking at us from a house window. The little dog fogs up the glass against the late January cold. Max and I take turns kicking a pebble before he picks it up and notes the rust colors aloud. Spice. Marigold. Fire.

Okay, show-off, I tease. Before winter break, before all this with Nicole and Luca, Max was letting himself love art even more. Though he's never shown me much, he decided lately he wanted to go to art school. He's gone from his sketchbook to full-blown paintings prepping for his application to Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Their last April deadline is his goal, a fall start. He puts the pebble in his pocket.

What I don't say is that this walk home is what I imagine a good life would be before death. You know something terrible is going to get you in the end, but you act like you don't know that most of the time. We talk about how everyone sucks in high school. How no one greeted us back today. Not even the people I study calculus with. None of Max's new art friends. How neither of us saw Nicole. How there are only five months left of high school anyway, so why should anything matter? I look at my phone. It's five fifteen. I tell Max.

We start walking faster.


POTATOES


We find Mom cutting potatoes in the kitchen. Hard-bodied tubers, first sliced in half—the way she plants them in the spring—their white exposed and then placed in the ground, a white face to a brown one. Then she scores them into half circles to bake.

Potatoes grow well here, and she keeps them in her pantry so we have them throughout the winter, when we're stuck inside for months. If we lived in Costa Rica, with all of Mom's extended family, I think she would prefer to be outside every day in a garden. Every day bringing in something new. Instead, the lack of sun is harder on us, whose bodies belong in the warmth and light. Despite Dad's Nordic genes, he seems to be upset at all times of the year.

Mom gives Max and me kisses on the cheeks, saying, "Mijos, how was your first day back?"

We say, "Fine." Like before. But I can tell we are both relieved that we got here first. We are back to our after-school routine, but now with a tighter turnaround on counseling days. Somehow we all managed to hide our suspension from Dad. Mom had us go to the Central Park Recreational Center to do our community service after winter break for two weeks before we were allowed to go back. I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if Dad knew.


NEIGHBOR'S DOG


I take the trash out while Max stays inside with Mom. Across the fence, our neighbor's dog is lying on the cold concrete. She is chewing on something, and it must be sharp, because she spits it out with the same face she makes when she catches bees in the summer. I say her name Molly and open the door to the neighbor's yard. She seems scared of me for a second, and I understand why. I was angry last week when she went after the mail carrier. A swift leg to the chest. I hope she's forgiven me.

I walk slowly and see that she spit out a slightly crushed pest beetle. I pull it away, leave the yard, and place the beetle by our garage. It probably came from the neighbor's basement. I call the dog's name again when she sniffs back at an egress window, and she snaps out of the cycle for a moment, warm lab eyes at me, before she looks back again for another beetle.

I understand her. I also keep going back to what I shouldn't—the woods just beside the river.

Excerpted from Saints of the Household by Ari Tison. Copyright © 2023 by Ari Tison. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.