It was late October, the kind of cold that came early in the Wind River Basin and settled into your bones like an unpaid debt. The sky was iron-gray. The cottonwoods by the creek had already lost most of their leaves. My mother’s SUV idled in a cloud of white exhaust while she stood on the porch hugging her coat closed, avoiding my eyes.
“It’s just until Rick gets things straightened out,” she said.
That was her favorite phrase. Gets things straightened out.
Rick had been “getting things straightened out” for three years—after the foreclosure notice, after the gambling debt, after he sold my father’s tools without asking, after he turned our garage into a shrine to bad ideas and cheap liquor. Every time the world caved in around him, he acted like it was temporary and everybody else had to absorb the damage until his luck changed.
I looked past my mother at the old ranch house. Two stories, white paint peeling off the boards in long curls, wide front porch sagging at one corner, smoke lifting out of the chimney. The Reed place sat twenty miles outside of Riverton, alone against the hills with cattle pastures rolling out in every direction. I had been there exactly three times in my life, and none of those visits had ended well.
“You said we were going to Casper,” I told her.
She tightened her mouth. “Plans changed.”
