Mr. Bob threw his hooves in the air on top of the roof to show me who was boss, and I ducked between the slats in the white fence and headed home, through rows of hydrangeas, columbines, and purple and yellow daisies. I needed a shower. I was now dirty and sweaty because of a naughty goat.

Sundance ran up beside me and licked my hand. What a pal.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Tilly Kandinsky
Portland, Oregon
1985

When Tilly was seventeen years old, she was able to put all the drifting, terrorizing pieces of her life together like a puzzle, and she remembered the night her father was killed.

She flinched as she remembered her father punching Johnny in the face, screaming at him . . . She saw Betsy bursting through the front door, her face not surprised at all, as if she knew what she would see . . . then Betsy turned toward the kitchen and ran back out with a butcher knife in her hands and stabbed her father after he hit Johnny again, Johnny’s head snapping back.

Tilly remembered, too, what her brother and father were fighting about, and what Johnny accused her father of doing. Was Johnny right?

Tilly’s mother left when she was five. That’s when they all of a sudden moved away to Oregon from Idaho. But as her mind cleared, Tilly began to wonder if her father was telling the truth about her mother leaving her. Her mother had loved her. She had told Tilly she loved her every day. She hugged her all the time, made her Mickey Mouse waffles on Sunday and her lunches for school every day. She tucked notes into her lunch sack. She took her for ice cream and to the movies, even if her mother had bruises on her face or she walked with a limp after what her father had done to her.

Tilly’s father told her that her mother had left them when she got up one night to give her a hug because she’d had a nightmare. Her father was all dirty, mud dripping off of him, standing in the family room in his black gardening boots.

“Your mother left us,” he said, panting, his face red and sweaty. “She doesn’t love us anymore.”

“What? Yes, she does,” she protested, already tearing up. “She loves me.”

“No, she doesn’t, Tilly. She had a boyfriend and she moved out, and we’re moving, too. Start packing.”

“I don’t want to go without Mommy! I’m not leaving without Mommy!”

Her father slapped her across the face, sending her sprawling into a wall, and told her, “Shut up and quit crying, you stupid baby.”

Then Johnny came out of his bedroom. He was fifteen years old. Her father told him that they were moving, that their mother had left them. “No she didn’t,” he said. “She didn’t leave us, she wouldn’t do that.”