Back in his own room, small as a closet, Nate could hear the little record player that Junie listened to, to help her get to sleep. She owned only two records—“Surfer Girl” and “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.” Tonight it was “Mrs. Brown” by Herman’s Hermits. Junie’s high, thin voice sang along, then faded out at last.

Nate lay in the dark, restless. Living on a farm, he had seen accidents and injuries plenty of times before—times when his dad or Rufus or himself had cut his hand on a blade or gotten kicked by a cranky heifer. Once, rough-housing with Larry in the hayloft, he’d fallen through a hole in the floorboards, but the lucky presence of the manure pile had kept him from getting hurt. Another time Junie had broken her arm. But something felt different now. Worse.

The picture came back to him of his dad in his chair in the kitchen, as he’d been all winter, looking out the window. His mother, laying a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Talk to me, Carl. Can’t you just talk to me?”

Nate thought about the way he’d treated his father, back in December, when that flyer had come from Sears with pictures of all the new bicycles and his dad had said they couldn’t afford one. He thought about the drive to town they’d made the week before for feed and grain, how his father had looked over at him and said, “I know I’m not much good for you and Junie these days. You’d probably be better off without me.”

Don’t say that, Dad, he should’ve said. He should’ve told his dad how much they loved him, how much faith he had that sooner or later his dad would turn things around.

I don’t even need a dumb bike, Nate could’ve said. / just want you. Instead of the words that actually came out of his mouth: “You promised.”

The way Nate’s bed was placed, a person could look out the window without getting up, but to see the sky, you had to open the window and stick your head out. Cold as it was, he did. “The one thing that never changes is the constellations,” his dad used to tell him. “If you ever get to feeling shaky, you might try looking up at them, see if that doesn’t set things right.”

Most times Nate loved the silence of the night—when the tractor lay still and even the cows were quiet, and all you could hear was your own breathing. But there was nothing reassuring or peaceful about the silence tonight. Nate looked out over the field—the expanse of unbroken white snow, illuminated by a sliver of new moon—and tried to imagine his dad out there someplace, the same stars shining down on him, through some window, wherever he might be.