Then Aunt Sal picked up the vacuum cleaner and plugged it in. She turned the machine on, the roar making it clear: No point in talking further.

“You go on too, stay with your sister,” she said to Nate over the roar. “I’ll put on water for macaroni and cheese.”

Junie was curled under her TV blanket with her model horses when Nate came in. The room was dark, except for the flickering blue glow of the set. Cartoon Cavalcade was over and Andy Griffith was starting, with the familiar whistling that marked the start of the show. There was the boy, Opie, walking down a sunny dirt road, a fishing pole resting on his shoulder.

In Mayberry—where Andy Griffith lived with his son, Opie—you had mountains with quarries and caves and moonshine stills hidden away and fishing holes where the fish practically jumped onto your hook. Life looked nice and happy. But the thing Nate loved about his own home, Lonetree, Montana, was the vast open space of nothing but sky overhead, the fields stretched out flat and golden as far as the horizon. On this piece of land, his dad used to tell him, a person could spot every star without a single house or treetop blocking the view. From the safe spot out behind the barn, with the moonlight casting a ghostly silver light on the tractor, the night always seemed magical.

Nate’s dad had started taking him to look at the stars when he was younger than Junie, even, telling him the story of how the universe was made and teaching him the constellations. Cassiopeia first, the Big Dipper, Orion the hunter.

“See the proud way he’s standing?” His dad had pointed out Orion to Nate. “Look how his legs are spread apart, like a cowboy facing down some cattle rustler. Big and bold.”

Nate could remember his dad big and bold like that— up on the barn roof replacing shingles, with his shirt off in the sun, or flying one of the amazing kites he used to make for Junie when their mom thought he should be doing the farm accounts.

Afternoons when the two of them finished their milking in time, he and Nate would play ball out behind the barn. His dad had hung a mattress on the back side of the barn wall, painted with a circle for the strike zone. He’d call out pointers on Nate’s curveball and his slider and the pitch that had been his own specialty, the screwball.