There was no question anymore. They were moving. Mom was almost done packing up the items they were going to keep, for storage in Poppa and Grandma’s barn until she found a new place to live in Billings. Everything else was going to be sold at the auction, to pay back Sam Carter. Once their place was sold, the plan was for Nate and Junie to stay at Aunt Sal and Uncle Harold’s until school got out. Then they’d join their mother. Come September, he and Junie would be going to a new school, where they wouldn’t know a soul.

Nate wondered if his dad knew what was going on. Of course, it was his dad’s fault this was happening in the first place. If he’d stuck around and taken care of things, like other people’s dads, this never would have happened. If he’d been someone like Poppa, they might not have a lot, but they’d still have cattle in the barn and a tractor, and they’d be sowing seed for the new crop instead of looking out, as Nate did now, to a scruffy expanse of unfilled soil and an almost-empty barn, instead of boxing up their pots and pans and watching the last of their cattle being hauled away in the back of a truck.

“Your father abandoned us,” Mom had said. And it came to Nate that he had.

“Don’t drop it!” Junie called to Nate as he carried the cloud chamber wrapped in a blanket out to the car, in the rain, and set it in the back of the station wagon. Next to it was Uncle Harold’s projector and the rolled-up poster drawings of the paths made by the different kinds of ionizing rays. On the other side he’d already loaded the cooler with the dry ice inside.

“I’m really proud of you, Nate,” Mom told him, pulling out of the drive. “Whatever the judges say, you did a great job.”

“The judges are going to love it,” Junie said. “Wait till they see those sparkles start dancing all over the place.”

They stopped by their grandparents’ house to pick them up, then headed off to the school. In the gym the bleachers had been partially folded back toward the walls, and long rows of tables were set up to display the projects. When Nate’s family got there, the room was already filling up. Someone had built a guinea pig maze. Pots of beans, labeled with the names of different fertilizer combinations, were arranged in half a dozen different locations. Three kids had built model volcanoes, in which they would demonstrate eruptions. There was a girl with a jar full of cows’ eyeballs that she planned to dissect—one per hour. Alongside it was a drawing of an oversized eyeball, side view, each part labeled with red arrows.