Last year their Mercury needed a new radiator, only there was no money to buy one. This year it was the washing machine that gave out. Nate didn’t know the particulars, but late at night he’d hear his parents talking in the kitchen, and where once there’d been laughter and his dad’s deep bass voice, now it was arguing, and something worse: a sound, from his mother, of disappointment and defeat.

“It’s not Dad’s fault we’re having troubles,” Nate told his grandfather the day he’d come by the house a couple of summers back to find Nate’s mom bent over the books, crying.

“Where’s Carl at this time?” Poppa asked. When his mom explained about taking Junie to the rodeo in town, Poppa had just shaken his head. Poppa never said much, but Nate knew his grandfather disapproved of his dad. It was Poppa who’d given them their land, and in his opinion, his son-in-law hadn’t done a very good job with it. Even with the money their mom made teaching piano, they were just barely getting by.

But Dad had said all of that was going to change. Back in the spring he’d borrowed a lot of money from an old friend of Poppa’s, Sam Carter, who’d struck it big in cattle. With the cash, he’d bought a new baler and eighty additional acres for haying, and for a while there he had seemed almost happy. The plan was that they’d hay the alfalfa to sell. Dad had never worked so hard as he did on that grain crop—digging the new irrigation ditches, fertilizing and reseeding the alfalfa.

“This is the one that will turn things around for us, Helen,” he’d told Nate’s mother. Nights when he came in from the field, he’d set a single stalk of alfalfa on the table, so they could study the progress of their crop. “Pretty soon now the kernels will start plumping up,” he told them. “And so will my wallet, honey.”

If things went well, he said, they could pay Sam Carter back within the year. From then on, it would all be gravy. Nate could get a bike his own size instead of the old red Pee Wee lowrider he’d had since he was seven, and Junie could get a regular horse she could actually ride instead of the crazy pony they had now, and maybe a saddle to boot. They’d fix the suspension on the Mercury station wagon and the four keys on his mother’s piano that had stopped sounding, making odd little gaps in the music when she played. Maybe they’d even get a telescope.