The Entire Sky

by Joe Wilkins

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

With echoes of Demon Copperhead and Plainsong, a poignant story about a troubled boy on the run, an aging rancher, and a woman at a crossroads, who find unexpected solace and kinship in the family they make.
 
With his long hair and penchant for guitar, teenage Justin is the spitting image of his idol, Kurt Cobain—a resemblance that has often marked him an outcast. When the long-simmering abuse from his uncle finally boils over, Justin has no choice but to break free, in a violent act that will haunt him, and try to make it on his own as a runaway.
 
Meanwhile, in rural Montana, Rene Bouchard, a rancher nearing retirement, grieves the recent death of his wife. Her passing has revealed precisely how fractured the family has become—particularly the relationship between Rene and his daughter, Lianne. As old wounds ache anew, father and daughter begin to doubt the possibility of reconciliation, even as they each privately yearn for it.
 
Justin’s wanderings bring him to the Bouchard family ranch, and soon Rene and Lianne take the boy in as their own. But before long, Justin’s past threatens to catch up with him, jeopardizing not only his new bond with Rene and Lianne but also the home he’s finally been able to claim. With its lyricism, tangible evocation of place, and piercing insight reminiscent of the novels of Barbara Kingsolver and Kent Haruf, The Entire Sky is an unforgettable piece of modern, American fiction.
 

Release date: July 2, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 240

Sample

AFTER THE PICKUP SPED past, the boy crawled up out of the weeds and cheatgrass and started again down the slope of the mountain road, paperboard guitar case in hand, green canvas backpack jouncing about his ears and shoulders, the cold afternoon light hazed with roaddust. He was moving fast, breathing hard. He could taste it, the dust.

At the one-lane river bridge, he looked both ways up and down the long wing of gravel. No one coming, not as far as he could see. He hugged the battered guitar case to his chest and took off at a near run, the knock of the instrument inside making a kind of music. The rusted struts of the old bridge rose above him and slid over him, and the thick, cross-hatching shadows darkened his vision in time as he breathed, as he ran. When he was halfway across, a fishing boat bobbed around the upriver bend, fly lines curling through the air and lighting on the deep green water. The man at the oars spotted the boy and lifted his chin in acknowledgment.

Fuck. Here he was, a kid—sixteen but so skinny and small people often mistook him for younger—with an army surplus backpack and a guitar running across a nowhere bridge on a nowhere road in the middle of the afternoon. Anyone who saw him would be sure to remember him.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He slowed, waved back. Tried to pretend everything was okay, was as it should be. He’d gotten good at pretending. Across the bridge and out of sight, he ran again. His heart sounded hard in his ears. A mile on, the gravel road opened onto a blacktop highway, the tight green-dark corridor of forest opening as well, and now he crouched down and considered.

He was only a few miles east of Nye and figured he couldn’t hitchhike just yet. Someone from town might recognize him. He’d ridden the school bus with his little cousins and the few other Nye kids all the way to Absarokee, had picked up the mail at the post office any number of times for his aunt, had been hauled on beer runs to the Trading Post with his uncle Heck. That was before Heck had stopped letting him go to school, go anywhere for that matter. Before it got bad.

Huddled in the grass and pine saplings at the edge of the road, the boy dug his hands into dead needles and gritty, fungal-smelling soil. Don’t think about Heck, about Heck’s astonished face. The weight of the splitting maul.

His heart a hot, mad animal in him, the boy rocked and leaped up and ran along the blacktop, his footfalls loud, the impossibly large strides of his shadow somehow matching his own—and then he held up, cursed himself for being so dumb, and crashed down through the ditch and into the woods.

He leaned against a pine and caught his breath. He had to be smart about this. These were the hours that mattered most. The road would be faster, but he couldn’t risk being spotted. And if he tried to run in the woods, he’d trip over a root or rock and break his ankle. He decided to split the difference and parallel the road just inside the forest. He moved slowly, carefully, watching his every step.

The slope of the land was steep and uneven. The runoff creeks coursed with meltwater. Barbwire fences sliced along property lines. Wherever there’d been logging in the past decades—Heck had at least taught him the woods—the pines grew dog-hair tight, the forest dark and dusty, with sharp dead stobs below the canopy. The boy thrashed through as best he could, though he tore his flannel and scratched his arms where he’d rolled his sleeves up. He was worried the guitar case wouldn’t hold or that his shoes, ratty Chucks with slick soles, would blow out. An hour on, maybe more—fuck it—he made for the road.

The hand of the sun at his back, he came up the berm and kicked through the beer cans and deer bones in the verge. The first couple of times he heard a vehicle, he again threw himself into the bar ditch. Eventually, though, he realized he wouldn’t be able to tell who was a local and who wasn’t, not until he’d seen the gun rack or fly rods in the back window. Not until they were long gone.

The sun dipped behind the blue shoulders of the Beartooths, and the boy shivered. He hoped maybe the fishermen were calling it a day and heading back to their lodges or fancy hotels or wherever they stayed. At his back came the far grind of an engine. He resisted the urge to flatten himself in the weeds and stepped just off the blacktop, stuck out his thumb.

From the vast blackness of the backlit mountains, a vehicle emerged. The wind of its passing pulled at the tails of the boy’s flannel and flipped his long, dirty yellow hair across his face. A truck stopped some yards beyond, and the boy finger-combed his hair from his eyes, spied a bristle of fly rods through the Bronco’s dusty window. The whole of him unclenched, a hard knot of held breath draining from his lungs.

—Where to?

One of the fishermen, gray waders rolled down around his waist, silver can of beer in hand, was already out and leaning the seat forward so the boy could climb in.

—The interstate, if you’re going that far.

The boy lifted his guitar in first, then hauled himself in. He had to clear away plastic boxes of bright, feathery flies and fast-food wrappers and beer cans and crumpled sweatshirts and a couple of grungy ball caps to make room.

—It’s a mess back there.

The driver wore dark glasses, despite the fading light, and lifted a can of beer to his lips, sipped.

The boy flinched. The driver, with his short red-brown hair and neatly trimmed goatee, didn’t look a thing like his uncle Heck. But the dark glasses, the way he draped his hand over the wheel, wedged the can of beer in his crotch—it was all too familiar.

—No worries, the driver said, his voice deep and steady. We take turns when we go fishing. Driver only gets one beer on the river, one beer on the road.

The other man, lanky, patchy blond stubble stippling his jaw, folded himself into the cab and slammed the door. He grinned at the boy over the back of the bench seat.

—But the passenger, he said, laughing, gets to get shitcanned if he feels like it!

The driver checked his mirrors and eased the Bronco back onto the highway. The passenger, still laughing at his own joke, cracked another Coors Light.

—I’m Zach, he said. That ugly bastard behind the wheel is Cal.

—Kurt, the boy said, though his name was Justin.

—All right, Kurt. The interstate it is. Or, hell, if you want, we can take you all the way into Billings?

Billings was where Uncle Heck had picked him up last fall. Justin remembered the dirty marble floors and the high, intricately patterned ceilings of the old Greyhound station—and when they’d stepped out onto the street, right in front of them was a dancing man with three pink plastic clamshell hairclips in his beard.

Fucking bums, Heck had said. Degenerates. Whole city has gone to shit.

Justin wasn’t sure how far east Billings was—he’d thought to hitchhike straight west once he hit the interstate—but his uncle was right, Billings had almost been like a real city. He could likely busk his way into a little money there, maybe enough for a bus ticket. It’d be safer on the bus. And he could sleep more easily.

Pine shadows striated the highway. The evening began to pool and deepen in the road ditches, in the mountain valleys below and beyond. Now that he was sitting, Justin felt a bone-deep tiredness ripple through him. How long ago had he woke, weary and sick, in the predawn forest? He tried to tally the hours between then and now but stopped short of the moment he ran hell-bent from the barn with the maul held hard in his hands—the moment he brought the maul down on the soft place where Heck’s thick neck jointed into his chest.

—Billings’d be great, Justin said, swallowing against the bile rising in his throat, the fear and fury and gut-hollowing shame. Thanks.

—No sweat. Zach took a long drink, smacked his lips, and went on. Good day on the river. Rainbows are running. Cal landed a twenty-incher. At this he punched the driver lightly on the shoulder. Lucky bastard.

Justin’s mind flashed to the creek back of the trailer park in Bremerton and the astonishing colors of the spent salmon, their dark, mottled bodies drifting in the shallows.

—Yeah, man, Zach sighed. Good action all around. Always a good day on the river.

Zach drank again and dropped the empty to the floorboards, where it tinged and rolled. Then he hooked his elbow over the bench seat and turned to look right at Justin. Really took him in. Green canvas backpack. Beat-up guitar case. Long blond hair. Silver studs in his ears. Sharp face and small, almost girlish ears and nose. Knob of chin.

Zach studied the boy a moment longer and then, as if deciding, turned to the tape deck.

—You got a guitar there. You like music, Kurt? How about Springsteen? The Boss, right?

Before Justin could answer, the speakers crackled and came alive, and they drove on for a time, no one saying anything but the Boss: who was long gone, who was on fire, who was going down, down, down. The blacktop slid beneath them, the mountains faded into the deepening evening, and Justin leaned into the dusty plastic mesh of the speaker, into the noise, and slept.

When he woke, the details of the evening about him made no fucking sense whatsoever—glowing white fluorescents, a bank of gas pumps, tinny music. Big rigs idling in a wide gravel lot. The smeary reds of running lights. A man in cowboy boots and a blue corduroy ball cap walking stiff-legged toward the glass door of a gas station.

Justin sucked at the air and sat straight up, the story of this last day flooding into him—and now here he was at a truck stop in the back seat of a Bronco, fly rods bent above him.

But where were the fishermen? Where in the world was this truck stop?

He had the sense they’d been parked awhile, as it wasn’t the cessation of motion that had woken him. It was something else.

Maybe they knew? Maybe they’d stopped to get the cops?

He should go, go now. He slid his left arm through the strap on his pack and took hold of the handle of the guitar case. He fumbled and found the latch to lean the front seat up. Just as he was about to run, he heard Cal’s and Zach’s voices drifting through the open driver-side window. They were in front of the gas station, near the ice cooler. Justin eased himself back into the bench seat.

Zach was gesturing with his grocery sack, saying something about his girlfriend, who was a teacher, who knew kids like this. Homeless. Strung out. They’ll steal anything not nailed down.

—He’s scrawny, but he could be dangerous. I mean, what the hell was he doing hitchhiking out on the Nye Road?

Cal shook his head and spit. He said something that Justin couldn’t quite make out. The two men stood there, leaning toward each other, and Cal went on, his voice so low in timbre, it was only a far rumble. Justin closed his eyes and scooted that much closer to the window. Even if he couldn’t make sense of it, he liked the sound of Cal’s voice, how slow and even it was. The rumble ceased. Justin opened his eyes.

Both men had started toward the Bronco.

Fuck. He should have gone. That was maybe his only chance. Justin kept hold of his guitar case, but loosely, the strap of his pack at his elbow, and hunkered down. He laid his head back up against the speaker and closed his eyes as if he’d been sleeping the whole time.

The doors opened and slammed shut. The engine turned and caught. The Bronco began to move. After a time he could tell Zach was looking at him, reaching over the bench seat.

Oh, fuck. Justin let one eyelid flutter open and watched this tall, long-faced man lift the flap of his green canvas pack and stuff in a big plastic bottle of orange juice, a sack of peanuts, and a fistful of beef jerky sticks.

The Bronco picked up speed as they merged onto the interstate, and Justin couldn’t help but imagine the grease of jerky sticks, the sour and salt of orange juice and peanuts. He didn’t want to trust it. Not yet. For a long time, he held himself curled and still.

Both men silent, the music off, no sound now but tires and interstate, Justin finally sat up. Even in the deepening night, he could see they’d come out of the mountains and into a wide valley. Pine-studded ridges, a dark scribble of river sliding bridge to bridge beneath the freeway. Now banks of lights cut the sky, and a phalanx of smokestacks belched blue, orange, and yellow flames, the oily blooms somehow blacker than the night. Pumpjacks nodded in the dark distance.

—The Cenex oil refinery, Zach said, popping another beer. They say that smoke doesn’t do anything to you. That the air is fine. I don’t know.

The smoke faded, as did the lights.

They came up a high hill, then settled once again into the valley. The moon lifted over the southern horizon and slicked the dark river. As the moon drifted and grew, Justin couldn’t help but turn his hands in that sideways spill of brightness. He grinned to see the play of shadows on the back of the seat in front of him—a rabbit, a bird, the devil sign, a double fuck-you. He pulled the sleeves of his flannel up and studied the bruises on his arms, the blues and blacks carrying the shape of a hard grip, the press of fingers, a pattern like wings. He could feel, too, the wings of a bruise at the small of his back. And in the pit of him, a deeper bruising. Justin bit down hard against the choke in his throat, his hot tears. He was glad of the dark, the highway sounds.

The lights of farms and ranches soon competed with the moon, then clumps of lights—trailer parks, maybe, or small towns on the verge of being swallowed—and now regular rows of streetlights along frontage roads and gas stations, warehouses and strip malls.

They were in the city.

Off to the north loomed the dark prow of the Rimrocks, the high sandstone cliffs that cut through Billings. All those months ago, mid-October, Justin stepped off the Greyhound and got into his uncle’s truck, and for some reason, Heck had pointed the Rimrocks out to him. The only other thing Justin could remember Heck mentioning was his hair. How long it was, how he looked, his uncle said, halfway like a goddamn girl.

The Rimrocks were dark now, and close.

—You got a place to go?

Zach’s voice startled him. Before he could answer, Cal’s low baritone cut in.

—We got a room in the basement. Even got its own door. My wife and I don’t really do anything with it. There’s not any furniture. Except a TV and a VCR. My wife does her aerobics down there. Anyway, we could loan you a sleeping bag and a pillow. It’d be dry, warm.

Justin looked from one man to the other, the dark backs of their heads. They were both clean-cut, fit, maybe late twenties or early thirties, the kind of guys who were used to figuring things out, getting things done. Doing things their way.

—We grilled burgers last night, Cal went on. There’s still some in the fridge. Potato salad too. Some Pepsi, Mountain Dew.

Zach leaned over the seat, the drape of his big, long arm.

—Listen, Kurt, you don’t have to tell us anything. It’s just, you know, you’re a kid. We can’t put you out in the middle of the city at night. You want more help tomorrow, just let Cal know. Whatever it is, he’ll help. We’ll help.

Justin could taste the potato salad, the pop and fizz of a cold Pepsi. But he was too close to the mountain yet to trust anyone, too close to the trailer—to what he’d done.

Heck lying there in a puddle of blood.

—Okay, Justin said, his heart squeezed in a vise. Thanks.

HERE AT THE HILL’S crest, the world was two parts grass, three parts sky, and a pure measure of unraveling light. The nose of Old Blue, a Ford full-ton, tilted down the steep face of the Seventy-Nine Hill. The engine caught and revved on the grade, and as he drove, the man felt the sadness and heart-scatter of the past weeks whirl away in a gust of prairie wind.

As the hill flattened, he hit the gas and splashed through the south fork of Willow Creek, puddles here and there filigreed with ice and maybe sixteen inches of clear, moving water in the depths of the curving channel. Old Blue bounced up onto the long straightaway, and the man, Rene Bouchard, seventy-one years of age, shifted into third, dust barreling up behind him. The fences were in bad shape. Posts leaned like loose teeth. The barbwire bellied, broken here and there. Winter had been hard, and he hated to admit it, but he hadn’t given the place the work it needed these past years. Rene lifted his foot off the gas and coasted as he neared the pastures, the corrals, and the shed.

Out front of the camphouse, a low-slung, tin-roofed cabin, he slowed to a stop. An iron boot scraper squatted at the lip of the plank porch, and two straight-backed wooden chairs flanked the camphouse door. On the north side sat the rain barrels, the drinking-water cistern, and the pump, all up on railroad ties. From behind, the long white snout of the propane tank poked out. Directly south of the house, a wooden fence enclosed the garden Viv had always insisted on, the bed thick now with dry, matted grasses and the yellow-green stars of weeds. A footpath bordered with river rocks led off the porch, around the garden, and into the cottonwoods, willows, and chokecherries. The trees and the contortions of the land sheltered from view the outhouse as well as the far reaches of the trail, which led to a wide gravel bar where the north and south forks of Willow Creek met. You could cross the north fork stone by stone and clamber up the high cutbank. It was there, facing west, that Rene had long ago built a split-log bench, Viv’s sunset bench.

Well, he was home. And for the last time.

He cranked up Old Blue’s windows, pulled the handle, and shouldered open the pickup’s door, the hinges creaking. He worked his arm down one sleeve of his quilted flannel jacket, then the other. The day had been almost warm, but the cool edge of evening was in the breeze.

He studied the dust of the road, the untrammeled grass about the camphouse and corrals. No sign of the sheep, or of Bassett, his winter sheepherder of many years. He thought to haul in the few supplies he’d brought—a couple sacks of groceries, his .243—but Rene had his one chore, and ranch work, as he’d always told his own, came first.

The shed door opened into shit-and-straw-scented darkness, and Rene moved by bone memory. He dippered oats into a metal pail and, beneath the broken-peaked roof, walked the belly of the shed. The high, south-facing windows let in just enough dirty light to lean blacker shadows away from the support posts, pens, and lambing jugs. Soon, the shed would fill for lambing—the bleats of ewes in labor, drift of hay dust, scent of blood and iodine—but for now, it was one long emptiness. At the far end, he slid the bolt open and pushed the gate to the side on its rollers and blinked at the sudden sunset colors that met him.

Rene called out to the dry hills, clicked his tongue, and shook the metal pail, oats rattling, dancing—and over the grassy gusts of wind came the pounding of hooves. Nine Spot crested the hill first, the blue-black of her tossed mane and slim shoulders, then Big Red, looking as ever like a horse made somehow out of bricks save for the long white lick down the center of his nose. Rene called again, shook the pail, and felt even before he put his hands to them the good, rippling hides of horses.

The chill of winter yet pooled in the camphouse’s shadowed corners and clung to the bare wood of the walls. For the last, slanting light, Rene pulled back the curtains. In the kitchen, he lit a fire of crumpled newspapers and wood shavings in the stove, then knelt and slowly laid himself all the way down, his left hip and lower back grinding in protest. With his shoulder and cheek mashed against the thin layer of dust and mouse droppings on the pocked linoleum, he punched the sparker until the propane burner below the fridge caught.

He finagled a hand underneath himself and pushed up and managed to get halfway to standing only to collapse onto the long bench in front of the table. He sat a moment and breathed as the pain flared and faded, as his heart galloped and slowed.

When Rene was sixteen, cowboying out on the Comanche Flats, his horse had spooked at a rattlesnake. Rene Bouchard was born to the saddle and had been bucked off plenty, but this time his left foot caught in the stirrup. The horse, young and full of spit, dragged him across the prairie a good long ways before he finally twisted free. Rene lay sprawled in the dirt and knew he was lucky he hadn’t been gutted by a cactus or any other damn thing. Still, with his left leg mangled, he had to crawl nearly two miles back to camp, where the other cowboys loaded him into a Model T and drove him to Billings. The old country doctor, a bulldog pipe clenched in his teeth, did what he could, but the healed leg came out an inch shorter than the other. Though he could still ride and work with the best of them, Rene had limped ever since. As he aged, the limp settled into a near constant pain in his hip and lower back.

Just so long as he could stay off the floor, he thought now, the heels of his hands pressing on his knees. Stay on his feet, in the saddle.

Outside, the wind blew in curves and circles. Bits of dust and dead grass ticked against the metal roof and the lead-glass windows. Rene hauled the supplies in from Old Blue and filled the fridge, cupboards, and drawers. With Lianne gone to Billings for the day, he’d taken his one chance and pretty well emptied what was left at the house in town. Stocking up at the ranch was an old habit, but Rene needed only a handful of days out here. Enough time to saddle up Nine Spot and take a ride, sit in the night beneath the stars with a glass of whiskey. He told himself he wouldn’t go check on Bassett, who was out with the sheep in one pasture or another. No, he’d do the few things he came to do, then he’d take a seat on Viv’s sunset bench, prop his rifle on the hard prairie earth, and lean himself down onto the point of the blue-black barrel. Shoot himself through the heart.

Rene fed lengths of juniper and pine to the fire. The stove creaked and warmed. He tied back the thick wool hangings that served as doors for each of the bedrooms to get a little warmth in there. The kids used to sleep in the bunkbed room, a set of slim army surplus bunks along each of the three walls. Lianne, the oldest, always took the top bunk by the window, Keith and Dennis fought over the other two top bunks, though there wasn’t really any difference, and Franklin, the baby, was left with one of the bottom bunks, usually the one below Lianne. Rene stared a moment longer at the raw board walls, the stain of old rain etching the window glass. So many years held in that still, small space. He let the curtain swing back into place.

In the kitchen, he ran the water to clear out the rust and spiders and set the percolator on the stove for coffee. Then he swept the floor, filled the kerosene lamps, and lit one against the slow-gathering dark.

What else was there to do? He stowed his .243 in the rack in his bedroom, the shells in the top dresser drawer.

He eased himself down into one of the two easy chairs. A bloom of dust rose as he gave his weight to the springs. The coarse fabric beneath his hands, the shape of the chair at his back—it all felt so familiar. And so goddamned different. Ah, Viv. Who would hold him or any of them together now that she was gone?

Hell, they’d already been falling apart for years.

Opposite where Rene sat, above the long bench and table, the bird feeder at the window was empty. With the days already tilting toward spring, the songbirds would be back soon. There was dry corn and a bin of sunflower seed in the barn.

Well, it didn’t matter much, not much at all, but at least it was something he could do.

OFF TO THE WEST, rags and tracers of deep orange and vermilion were snagged in the broken teeth of the Bull Mountains. A little higher, the whole sky was rose laced with lavender. Higher yet, periwinkle and cobalt. And in the east, the sky shone the gray-blue of nighthawks on the wing.

She had forgotten the casual, stunning brilliance of a sunset in eastern Montana. And not a soul out to see it, Lianne Parker thought, taking in the empty gravel streets, the tumbledown houses and slumped double-wides, wind pulling at the weeds. She popped the trunk and loaded two paper grocery sacks into her left arm and got another in her right, then made her way up the curving concrete walkway and onto the low porch, where she maneuvered open the screen door and knocked with her elbow.

—Dad, she called. Would you get the door?

Lianne blew a flyaway strand of hair from her eyes and looked west once more to catch the last colors, though from here the neighbor’s cottonwood obscured the view. The tree was a gnarled, half-dead thing. Hunks of bark and finger-thick branches littered what passed for a yard, mostly tufts of crabgrass. They should have that thing taken down, Lianne thought. Cottonwoods were so messy—the fluff in the spring, dead branches and sloughed bark all year long. It was ugly, even dangerous. And if it was gone, if it had been gone, Mom could’ve sat on the porch these last weeks and watched the sunset.

Lianne’s throat went tight. The tremors that had racked her without announcement since her mother’s death began once more in her chest and radiated out. She clung to the grocery bags and the crinkle of their thick brown paper.

—Dad, she called when she could get her mouth around the word again. Dad!

She wasn’t even sure who lived next door anymore in that bungalow with the untended yard. When she was growing up, it was the Kantas, Sandy and Ethel. But Sandy had been gone a long time now and was an old man even when she was little. Lianne remembered the exact way he tilted his hip and swung his wooden leg out in front of him. A souvenir from his sightseeing trip to France, he always joked, meaning of course the war. Ethel must be gone as well, though Lianne hadn’t heard of her passing, or if she had, she’d long forgotten.

A dust devil whirled to life and spun itself out. What might it be like to blessedly forget?

Lianne had stayed with her mother in those long last moments, twenty-six hours from when the delirium set in. Her brothers Keith and Dennis had been there in the beginning; the whole family had been there, kneeling, hovering, or perching on kitchen chairs pulled into a rough circle around the old Naugahyde couch, where their mother or mother-in-law or wife lay thin and dream-racked and covered in blankets. There was no term for the stage the cancer was in. It was everywhere; it was her.

Last winter, as nothing worked, nothing helped, Viv had finally refused any more treatment. And she wouldn’t stay in the hospital either. Of course Rene had backed her. The flint in his eye and the set of his stubbled jaw—every fresh-faced doctor in the place backed off when they saw this rough-hewn cowboy coming down the hall, saying he was damn well going to take his wife wherever she wanted, which was home, thank you much.

Lianne was the first to come help care for Viv, though as the weeks went on, the family slowly gathered. At first, it’d been like a reunion of sorts, just like Viv wanted. Casseroles and stories, grandkids giggling and darting about pell-mell. They hadn’t all been together since forever, and that’s how they said it—since forever—though in truth, it wouldn’t have been so hard to tally all those silent, bygone years. They did no such accounting, at least not out loud. One evening, everyone piled into the front room, and Rene pulled his harmonica from his pocket, which he seldom did anymore, and played tunes from his cowboy days—“Moonshiner” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “Tie a Knot in the Devil’s Tail.” The grandkids wheeled about, and Dennis and his second wife, whom Lianne had met only once before, jitterbugged with surprising grace across the creaking wooden floor. Viv, sitting against a bank of pillows, clapped and sang along, tears slicking her dark eyes, a smile on her lips.

But then Viv fell while making her way to the bathroom. Then she was awake less and less. Then, finally, when she was awake, she was barely there, her words slippery, ribboning into nonsense. Some hours into this new, strained reality, Lianne handed the cup of ice chips to Keith and rose to stretch her knees and back, and her mother’s hand shot out from beneath the scratch of wool blankets and grabbed her by the wrist, those muscles and bones remembering their old mothering strength.

—Pockets, she said, her voice falling, breaking into sibilance.

They’d called Lianne High Pockets as a girl. For how fast she grew.

—Pockets, Viv said again, her eyes flapping open. Help me here. I can’t.

In horror, Lianne watched as her mother tried to raise her shoulder. . .