“We were going to go to Warm Springs,” she said when she had breath enough to speak. “We were going to see Daddy.”

“I know,” Nate replied.

Twenty

THAT AFTERNOON WHILE THEY WERE AT SCHOOL, THEIR grandfather’s friend came and took Bucky away. As soon as she got home, Junie walked out to the barn, alone, and stayed there a long time. When Nate came in her room later, she was sitting on the bed. The picture she’d made of herself riding Bucky had been taken down off the wall. He saw it, crinkled in a wad, in her wastebasket.

“I know you’re sad, Junie,” their mother told her later at dinner. “Maybe someday we’ll get you a horse. One you can really ride. Bucky has a lot of problems, that’s all.”

“Just because someone’s got a few problems doesn’t mean you should give up on them,” Junie said, moving her fork around her potatoes.

In the old days, Junie would spend most afternoons out in the barn with Bucky, except for every other Tuesday, when the Brownies got together at the legion hall in town. But now, with her pony gone and her mom not wanting to drive anywhere, Junie mostly watched television—game shows or the reruns of family situation comedies like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver. One of her favorites was My Three Sons, about a man whose wife wasn’t around who raised three boys with the help of a crusty old geezer named Uncle Charlie. It bothered Junie that they never talked about what had happened to the mom on the show. Nobody ever acted sad that she wasn’t around. Junie had looked hard, she told Nate, but it didn’t seem like they had a picture of her on their wall, not even in the dad’s bedroom.

“If it was our mom and she died or something, I’d want to have a picture to remind me,” she said one day as they watched the show together.

Nate didn’t comment, but he knew what she was thinking. Over the weekend their mother had taken down all the photographs that had their dad in them, including the one in the front hall from their wedding day.