‘Bad luck’s got a sour taste, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said.

‘Do you want to know what he said to me?’ My father leaned on the glass countertop with his palms down. He smiled at me, as if he thought it was funny.

‘What?’ I said.

‘He said he didn’t require an answer from me, but he thought I was stealing things. Some yokel lost a wallet out on the course, and they couldn’t figure anybody else who could do it. So I was elected.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not a stealer. Do you know it? That’s not me.’

‘I know it,’ I said. And I didn’t think he was. I thought I was more likely to be a stealer than he was, and I wasn’t one either.

‘I was too well liked out here, that’s my problem,’ he said. ‘If you help people they don’t like you for it. They’re like Mormons.’

‘I guess so,’ I said.

‘When you get older,’ my father said. And then he seemed to stop what he was about to say. ‘If you want to know the truth don’t listen to what people tell you,’ was all he said.

He walked around the cash register, holding his white shoes, his pants pockets full of money. ‘Let’s go now,’ he said. He turned off the light when he got to the door, held it open for me, and we walked out into the warm summer night.

When we’d driven back across the river into Great Falls and up Central, my father stopped at the grocery a block from our house, went in and bought a can of beer and came back and sat in the car seat with the door open. It had become cooler with the sun gone and felt like a fall night, although it was dry and the sky was light blue and full of stars. I could smell beer on my father’s breath and knew he was thinking about the conversation he would have with my mother when we got home, and what that would be like.

‘Do you know what happens,’ he said, ‘when the very thing you wanted least to happen happens to you?’ We were sitting in the glow of the little grocery store. Traffic was moving behind us along Central Avenue, people going home from work, people with things they liked to do on their minds, things they looked forward to.

‘No,’ I said. I was thinking about throwing the javelin at that moment, a high arching throw into clear air, coming down like an arrow, and of my father throwing it when he was my age.

‘Nothing at all does,’ he said, and he was quiet for several seconds. He raised his knees and held his beer can with both hands. ‘We should probably go on a crime spree. Rob this store or something. Bring everything down on top of us.’

‘I don’t want to do that,’ I said.

‘I’m probably a fool,’ my father said, and shook his beer can until the beer fizzed softly inside. ‘It’s just hard to see my opportunities right this minute.’ He didn’t say anything else for a while. ‘Do you love your dad?’ he said in a normal voice, after some time had passed.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Do you think I’ll take good care of you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’

‘I will,’ he said.

My father shut the car door and sat a moment looking out the windshield at the grocery, where people were inside moving back and forth behind the plate-glass windows. ‘Choices don’t always feel exactly like choices,’ he said. He started the car then, and he put his hand on my hand just like you would on a girl’s. ‘Don’t be worried about things,’ he said. ‘I feel calm now.’

‘I’m not worried,’ I said. And I wasn’t, because I thought things would be fine.