And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it.

Chapter 2

After that night in early September things began to move more quickly in our life and to change. Our life at home changed. The life my mother and father lived changed. The world, for as little as I’d thought about it or planned on it, changed. When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again–which is a loss. But to shield yourself–as I didn’t do–seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

On the night my father came home from losing his job at the Wheatland Club, he told my mother about it straight out and they both acted as if it was a kind of joke. My mother did not get mad or seem upset or ask him why he had gotten fired. They both laughed about it. When we ate supper my mother sat at the table and seemed to be thinking. She said she could not get a job substituting until the term ended, but she would go to the school board and put her name in. She said other people would come to my father for work when it was known he was free, and that this was an opportunity in disguise–the reason we had come here–and that Montanans did not know gold when they saw it. She smiled at him when she said that. She said I could get a job, and I said I would. She said maybe she should become a banker, though she would need to finish college for that. And she laughed. Finally she said, ‘You can do other things, Jerry. Maybe you’ve played enough golf for this lifetime.’

After dinner, my father went into the living room and listened to the news from a station we could get from Salt Lake after dark, and went to sleep on the couch still wearing his golf clothes. Late in the night they went into their room and closed the door. I heard their voices, talking. I heard my mother laugh again. And then my father laughed and said, loudly, still laughing, ‘Don’t threaten me. I can’t be threatened.’ And later on my mother said, ‘You’ve just had your feelings hurt, Jerry, is all.’ After a while I heard the bathtub running with water, and I knew my father was sitting in the bathroom talking to my mother while she took her bath, which was a thing he liked doing. And later I heard their door close and their light click off and the house become locked in silence.

And then for a time after that my father did not seem to take an interest in working. In a few days the Wheatland Club called–a man who was not Clarence Snow said someone had made a mistake. I talked to the man, who gave me the message to give to my father, but my father did not call back. The air base called him, but again he did not accept. I know he did not sleep well. I could hear doors close at night and glasses tapping together. Some mornings I would look out my bedroom window and he would be in the backyard in the chill air practicing with a driver, hitting a plastic ball from one property line to the next, walking in his long easy gait as if nothing was bothering him.