His mother closed her eyes. Very slowly, she shook her head, the way a person might who was seeing something terrible on the news—the scene of an earthquake or some village in Africa where people were starving—but couldn’t do anything about it.

“I miss your dad too,” she said softly.

“So let’s go be with him.”

“Right now the most important thing I can do is make sure you and your sister are taken care of,” she told him, and her voice was suddenly different. “That’s something your father didn’t seem to think about much. To me, what he did was not just an act of violence against himself. It was an act of violence against all of us.”

Nate got up from the table. “Dad loves us.”

“Your dad shot himself in the head, Nate,” she said, looking him in the eye finally. “He abandoned us. That’s the most selfish thing a parent can do.”

“I don’t care,” he told her, his voice rising again. “I just want to go see him. I want to know he’s okay.”

“Well, the truth is, he’s not okay. He’s lying in a hospital bed with bandages on his head, talking like a crazy person. He can’t even manage to shoot himself without messing it up.”

“Maybe you can just forget about him, but Junie and I can’t.”

Nate ran upstairs to his room. Even with the door closed, he could hear his mother downstairs, crying. Lying on his bed, he did the same.

Nate couldn’t be sure, but he thought the ambulance that took his father away had the name of a hospital in Leopold on it. So he found the number for that hospital in the phone book in his parents’ bedroom and waited till his mother was outside in the barn before making the call.

“Carl Chance,” he said. “I’m looking for Carl Chance. I think he might be a patient there.”

“Nobody here by that name,” the voice said.

He tried the hospital in Beulah next, and then Billings, but nothing. “Maybe he’s been released and gone home,” one voice told him.

“He isn’t home,” Nate said.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice. “Good luck finding him.”

Across the hall the bath was running—Mom getting Junie ready for bed, Junie asking for a story, Mom saying, wearily, “Not tonight, honey. I’ve got a headache.”

“I know what,” Junie said. “This time I’ll tuck you in for a change.” Then came Junie softly humming. She would be stroking her mother’s hair, the way she liked to. “Pretty mommy,” she said. “Pretty, pretty mommy.”

“I’m so sorry, Junie,” their mother murmured.