We’ll do something different tonight.” He smiled at me in an odd way. This was not a thing he usually said, or the way he usually talked. He liked The Mermaid, and my mother—as far as I knew—didn’t mind it if he went there.

“That sounds good,” I said.

“We’ll surprise your mother,” he said. “We’ll make her happy.”

We drove out past the air base on Highway 87, past where there were planes taking off into the night. The darkness was dotted by the green and red beacons, and the tower light swept the sky and trapped planes as they disappeared over the flat landscape toward Canada or Alaska and the Pacific.

“Boy-oh-boy,” my father said—just out of the dark. I looked at him and his eyes were narrow, and he seemed to be thinking about something. “You know, Jackie,” he said, “your mother said something to me once I’ve never forgotten. She said, ‘Nobody dies of a broken heart.’ This was somewhat before you were born. We were living down in Texas and we’d had some big blow-up, and that was the idea she had. I don’t know why.” He shook his head.

He ran his hand under the seat, found a half-pint bottle of whiskey, and held it up to the lights of the car behind us to see what there was left of it. He unscrewed the cap and took a drink, then held the bottle out to me. “Have a drink, son,” he said. “Something oughta be good in life.” And I felt that something was wrong. Not because of the whiskey, which I had drunk before and he had reason to know about, but because of some sound in his voice, something I didn’t recognize and did not know the importance of, though I was certain it was important.

I took a drink and gave the bottle back to him, holding the whiskey in my mouth until it stopped burning and I could swallow it a little at a time. When we turned out the road to Highwood, the lights of Great Falls sank below the horizon, and I could see the small white lights of farms, burning at wide distances in the dark.

“What do you worry about, Jackie,” my father said. “Do you worry about girls? Do you worry about your future sex life? Is that some of it?” He glanced at me, then back at the road.

“I don’t worry about that,” I said.

“Well, what then?” my father said. “What else is there?”

“I worry if you’re going to die before I do,” I said, though I hated saying that, “or if Mother is. That worries me.”

“It’d be a miracle if we didn’t,” my father said, with the half-pint held in the same hand he held the steering wheel. I had seen him drive that way before. “Things pass too fast in your life, Jackie. Don’t worry about that. If I were you, I’d worry we might not.” He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

We drove on out behind the town of Highwood and onto the flat field roads toward our house. I could see, out on the prairie, a moving light where the farmer who rented our house to us was disking his field for winter wheat. “He’s waited too late with that business,” my father said and took a drink, then threw the bottle right out the window. “He’ll lose that,” he said, “the cold’ll kill it.” I did not answer him, but what I thought was that my father knew nothing about farming, and if he was right it would be an accident. He knew about planes and hunting game, and that seemed all to me.

“I want to respect your privacy,” he said then, for no reason at all that I understood. I am not even certain he said it, only that it is in my memory that way. I don’t know what he was thinking of. Just words.