I did not like my mother being around the house so much at night, and I wished Glen Baxter would come back, or that another man would come along and entertain her somewhere else.

At two o’clock on a Saturday, Glen drove up into our yard in a car. He had had a big brown Harley-Davidson that he rode most of the year, in his black-and-red irrigators and a baseball cap turned backwards. But this time he had a car, a blue Nash Ambassador. My mother and I went out on the porch when he stopped inside the olive trees my father had planted as a shelter belt, and my mother had a look on her face of not much pleasure. It was starting to be cold in earnest by then. Snow was down already onto the Fairfield Bench, though on this day a chinook was blowing, and it could as easily have been spring, though the sky above the Divide was turning over in silver and blue clouds of winter.

“We haven’t seen you in a long time, I guess,” my mother said coldly.

“My little retarded sister died,” Glen said, standing at the door of his old car. He was wearing his orange VFW jacket and canvas shoes we called wino shoes, something I had never seen him wear before. He seemed to be in a good humor. “We buried her in Florida near the home.”

“That’s a good place,” my mother said in a voice that meant she was a wronged party in something.

“I want to take this boy hunting today, Aileen,” Glen said. “There’re snow geese down now. But we have to go right away, or they’ll be gone to Idaho by tomorrow.”

“He doesn’t care to go,” my mother said.

“Yes I do,” I said, and looked at her.

My mother frowned at me. “Why do you?”

“Why does he need a reason?” Glen Baxter said and grinned.

“I want him to have one, that’s why.” She looked at me oddly. “I think Glen’s drunk, Les.”

“No, I’m not drinking,” Glen said, which was hardly ever true. He looked at both of us, and my mother bit down on the side of her lower lip and stared at me in a way to make you think she thought something was being put over on her and she didn’t like you for it. She was very pretty, though when she was mad her features were sharpened and less pretty by a long way. “All right, then I don’t care,” she said to no one in particular. “Hunt, kill, maim. Your father did that too.” She turned to go back inside.

“Why don’t you come with us, Aileen?” Glen was smiling still, pleased.

“To do what?” my mother said. She stopped and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her dress pocket and put one in her mouth.

“It’s worth seeing.”

“See dead animals?” my mother said.

“These geese are from Siberia, Aileen,” Glen said. “They’re not like a lot of geese. Maybe I’ll buy us dinner later. What do you say?”

“Buy what with?” my mother said. To tell the truth, I didn’t know why she was so mad at him. I would’ve thought she’d be glad to see him. But she just suddenly seemed to hate everything about him.

“I’ve got some money,” Glen said. “Let me spend it on a pretty girl tonight.”

“Find one of those and you’re lucky,” my mother said, turning away toward the front door.

“I already found one,” Glen Baxter said. But the door slammed behind her, and he looked at me then with a look I think now was helplessness, though I could not see a way to change anything.

My mother sat in the backseat of Glen’s Nash and looked out the window while we drove. My double gun was in the seat between us beside Glen’s Belgian pump, which he kept loaded with five shells in case, he said, he saw something beside the road he wanted to shoot. I had hunted rabbits before, and had groundsluiced pheasants and other birds, but I had never been on an actual hunt before, one where you drove out to some special place and did it formally. And I was excited.