Cover

Title

Site Fidelity

Stories

Claire Boyles

Dedication

For Matty,
the reader I love best of all

Epigraph

One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

Rachel Carson

Ledgers

WE LET THE DUST settle for a month or two after Pop had his stroke, and then we sold the family ranch all in one piece to a cattleman from Montrose, Henson, whose name Pop didn't recognize. I had been living on the Farallones, studying site fidelity of ashy storm-petrels, birds most people probably haven't heard of and might not ever. An ill-timed oil spill or other catastrophe on the central coast of California could wipe the whole species off the map. It was a plum research gig, every ornithologist's dream job. But I love my pop, so I gave it up and came home. That closing was the only time I've been happy that Pop lost his speech, because I didn't want him to say out loud how much he wished I'd taken an interest in the damn cows instead of the damn birds.

Pop refused to let a subdivision be his last crop, so he gave Henson a good deal. We closed at the end of September. Henson signed the papers with rancher's hands, leathery and sun-weathered, just like Pop's. Henson is my age, plus a few years maybe—divorced, one young daughter—and I'm flat suspicious of the guy. How does anyone in their thirties come out of that recession with the kind of money it takes to buy a quarter section on the river, water rights attached, outside Gunnison?

Pop's stroke stole a lot of things from him that I miss too, some more precious than his ability to manage cattle—verbs, for example, and with them, anything resembling sentences. Also the use of his entire right side and all our savings in medical bills, though that last resolved just fine when we sold the ranch. The worst is that he can't say my name, Norah. Instead, Pop calls me Vera. I've stopped bothering to correct him. Vera, my mother, died in a puddle of her own blood and placenta the day I was born, waiting for the ambulance that turned down County Road 68 instead of County Road 68½.