That was the first thing I noticed after Randy slammed the front door hard enough to rattle the porch light. The second thing I noticed was the cold. Montana cold. The kind that slid under your jacket and wrapped around your ribs like barbed wire.
I stood on the porch with one duffel bag, a torn backpack, and my mother’s old denim coat. Randy stood inside the screen door with a whiskey bottle in one hand and his truck keys in the other, swaying just enough to look dangerous.
“You heard me,” he said. “You’re done here.”
I didn’t answer. By then, I knew better than to waste words on a drunk man looking for a fight.
At sixteen, I was six feet tall, all elbows and stubbornness, but Randy still had thirty years and seventy pounds on me. He also had the kind of temper that didn’t need a reason. My mother used to step between us when he got like that. She’d put a hand on his chest, look at me with those tired green eyes, and say, “Luke, go take Bear outside for a while.”
Mom had been dead eleven months.
There was nobody left to step between us now.
