“I was jealous of you too,” he said. “You had her to yourself for so long. I think if I hadn’t been so jealous, I’d have tried harder to bring you back. When you told me to go fuck myself, down in Mexico, I was relieved. I didn’t want to share her with you. She loved you first, and best. Her heart broke when you ran away. She never got over it. Dolly helped, but that pain was always there.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “The past is as good as it’s going to get.”

We sat in silence. After a while, I set the lighter down on the coffee table.

“I think I could use a drink,” Jim said. “Would you like a drink?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

Before long, I was good and drunk. I don’t recall how much Jim had to drink; much less than I, presumably, as he was steady enough to help me up the stairs to my old room and into my bed.

The last hour or so was a fog, but I do remember this. After he’d put me in bed, before Jim left the room, he hugged me, and I reached up and held on to him. I closed my eyes, and I thought of my mother, and I knew Jim was thinking of her too. And as I held on to Jim, for a moment, I imagined that I was clinging not to my stepfather, but to my real father, John Truman LaRue, made flesh again, who had arrived at that precise moment, to tell me . . . to tell me what?

seventeen

When I came downstairs the next morning, Jim and Dolly were gone. So I sat in the kitchen alone, drinking coffee. A memory came to me. Royal Gorge, Colorado, near the end of a monthlong road trip with Arch and the twins the summer after he graduated from Yeatman. The trip had been my first experience of the vastness of this country: the desert and the plains and the great mountains of the West, the color and the light and the black depth of the horizon as the sky went from blue to pink and orange to purple to cobalt flecked with innumerable stars. The sweet scents of sage and fir, woodsmoke and black mountain earth.

Arch wanted us all to kayak through the gorge; he said the experience would be life-changing. Even then, he was always trying to change our lives for us.