That winter, your dad quits his job, saying he’s tired of Haskell’s crap. He leaves the foreman’s house and moves in with his new girlfriend, who then announces he can’t stay there without a job. He hasn’t done anything but ranch work for twenty-five years, so he starts day-riding for Haskell again, then working full-time hourly, until he might as well be the foreman.

When you finish Western, you move into your mother’s house in town. Stacks of paperwork for the local horse-racing board cover every chair and table, and an old leather racing saddle straddles an arm of the couch. Your mother still thinks of herself as a horsewoman, and buys unbroken Thoroughbreds she doesn’t have time or money to train. She doesn’t have a truck or a trailer, or land for pasture, so she boards the horses and they end up as big, useless pets she never sees.

Summer evenings, you sit with your mom on the front step and eat ice cream with chocolate-peanut-butter chunks for dinner. You think about moving out, but then she might move in with you—and that would be worse.

You aren’t a virgin anymore, thanks to a boy you found who wouldn’t cause you trouble. He drops by from time to time, to see if things might start up again. They don’t. He’s nothing like Andy. He isn’t the one in your head.

When Carla leaves Dale and moves home to the Running H, you drive out to see her baby. It feels strange to be at the ranch now, with the foreman’s house empty and Carla’s little boy in the yard, and everything else the same.

“You’re so lucky to have a degree and no kid,” Carla says. “You can still leave.”

And Carla is right: You could leave. Apply to grad school in Santa Cruz and live by the beach. Take the research job in Chicago that your chemistry professor keeps calling about. Go to Zihuatanejo with Haskell’s friends, who need a nanny. They have tons of room, because in Mexico you don’t have to pay property tax if you’re still adding on to the house.

But none of these things seem real; what’s real is the payments on your car and your mom’s crazy horses, the feel of the ranch road you can drive blindfolded and the smell of the hay. Your dad will need you in November to bring in the cows.