Andy’s obituary says he was engaged to Lacey Estrada, which only Lacey or her doctor father could have put in. If you had the guts, you’d buy every paper in town and burn them outside the big white house where Lacey took him home and fucked him. Then Lacey shows up on the Hill with an engagement ring and gives you a sad smile as if you’ve shared something. If you were one of the girls who gets in fights on the Hill, you’d fight Lacey. But you don’t; you just look away. You’ll all be too old for the Hill when school starts, anyway.

At Western, in the fall, in a required composition class, your professor accuses you of plagiarism because your first paper is readable. You drop the class. Carla gets an A on her biology midterm at the university in Bozeman. She’s going to be a big-animal vet. Her dad tells everyone, beaming.

But the next summer, Carla quits college to marry a boy named Dale Banning. The Bannings own most of central Montana, and Dale got famous at the family’s fall livestock sale. He’d been putting black bulls on Herefords, when everyone wanted purebreds. They said he was crazy, but at the sale Dale’s crossbred black-baldies brought twice what the purebreds did. Dale stood around grinning, embarrassed, like a guy who’d beaten his friends at poker.

Carla announces the engagement in Haskell’s kitchen, and says she’ll still be working with animals, without slogging through all those classes. “Dale’s never been to vet school,” Carla says. “But he can feel an embryo the size of a pea inside a cow’s uterus.”

You’ve heard Dale use that line on girls before, but never knew it to work so well. Carla’s voice has a dreamy edge.

“If I don’t marry him now,” Carla says, “he’ll find someone else.”

In his head, Haskell has already added the Banning acreage to his own, and the numbers make him giddy. He forgets about having a vet for a daughter, and talks about the wedding all the time. If Carla backed out, he’d marry Dale himself. For the party, they clear the big barn and kill a cow. Carla wears a high-collared white gown that hides the scar on her neck—half a Running H—from the time she got in the way at branding, holding a struggling calf. Dale wears a string tie and a black ten-gallon hat, and everyone dances to Andy’s uncle’s band.

Your mother drives out to the ranch for the wedding; it’s the first time you’ve seen your parents together in years. Your dad keeps ordering whiskeys and your mother gets drunk and giggly. But they sober up enough not to go home together.