I didn't follow them past the timber-framed entrance to the mine. I've seen more welcoming caves in my life, Mom. This mine breathes the barometric wind, seeks to balance pressure. During storms, this mine whispers mythic quest stories—something about desire, about fallibility—or maybe the mine is its own Frank's Box, and it's Del whispering, but it's either nonsense, or Esperanto, or Tlingit, or another language in which I can't communicate fluently.

When you pass on, maybe I'll lease a mining claim, wait for the cave to start whispering.

Chris came out of the mine leaking whispered secrets. Two years ago, he spent ten thousand dollars on court fees for a half-sister we have in Reno, Del's daughter by his second wife, who got picked up on an identity theft charge. She lost her appeal and is currently in a minimum-security prison in Colorado. Chris writes her letters, sends Louis L'Amour paperbacks. Last year, two other half-brothers, from Del's third wife in Detroit, contacted Chris. They asked for tuition money to complete their automotive training certificates, and when he sent it, they cut contact. He paid a private investigator five thousand dollars to discover that they had embezzled money from a charter school, skipped bail, and taken jobs on a fishing tender outside Haines, Alaska, under assumed names.

Chris has an impeccable instinct for businesspeople, but a blind spot, or maybe a soft spot, for half-family. He didn't tell me, he said, because the price of the new family was insignificant,
but he couldn't accurately calculate the costs of my disapproval.

Chris came out of the mine with new conviction about ownership of circuses and monkeys, apples and trees. He calculated the relative strength of wind from the south and from the west, the breathy through-line of generations. He will not return to LA without the boys, and they won't leave the mine without Brandy.

Did you find Del down there? I asked.

It's just a big pile of rocks, he said. Obstructing everything.

Colton is right. My eyes are unmistakably from Del, brown, unremarkable, focused best on the periphery. I don't want to believe my heart is from Del too, suspicious, wandering, beating so much for the search that it forgets to love what it has already found. I want a heart that loves easily and well, a heart so welcoming and resilient and good that it doesn't have to fear breaking. A heart like Chris's. A heart like yours.

Love, Charley

To: Mom

From: Charley

Subject: Project Gold Rush

August 23, 2016

Dear Mom,

We promised to retrieve the gun safe and the guns in the near future. We promised to stop in Las Vegas so Brandy could visit her sister. We took rooms at Circus Circus, more amusement park than casino. Our new brothers are children, after all, and Chris loves trapeze artists and tumblers. I felt we were gambling enough.