Other days he would take me on long drives after school, to Highwood and to Belt and Geraldine, which are the towns east of Great Falls, and let me drive the car on the wheat prairie roads where I could be no danger to anyone. And once we drove across the river to Fort Benton and sat in the car and watched golfers playing on the tiny course there above the town.

Eventually, my father began to leave the house in the morning like a man going to a job. And although we did not know where he went, my mother said she thought he went downtown, and that he had left jobs before and that it was always scary for a while, but that finally he would stand up to things and go back and be happy. My father began to wear different kinds of clothes, khaki pants and flannel shirts, regular clothes I saw people wearing, and he did not talk about golf any more. He talked some about the fires, which still burned late in September in the canyons above Allen Creek and Castle Reef–names I knew about from the Tribune. He talked in a more clipped way then. He told me the smoke from such fires went around the world in five days and that the amount of timber lost there would’ve built fifty thousand homes the size of ours. One Friday he and I went to the boxing matches at the City Auditorium and watched boys from Havre fight boys from Glasgow, and afterward in the street outside we could each see the night glow of the fires, pale in the clouds just as it had been in the summer. And my father said, ‘It could rain up in the canyons now, but the fire wouldn’t go out. It would smolder then start again.’ He blinked as the boxing crowd shoved around us. ‘But here we are,’ he said, and smiled, ‘safe in Great Falls.’

It was during this time that my mother began to look for a job. She left an application at the school board. She worked two days at a dress shop, then quit. ‘I’m lacking in powerful and influential friends,’ she said to me as if it was a joke. Though it was true that we did not know anyone in Great Falls. My mother knew the people at the grocery store and the druggist’s, and my father had known people at the Wheatland Club. But none of them ever came to our house. I think we might’ve gone someplace new earlier in their life, just picked up and moved away. But no one mentioned that. There was a sense that we were all waiting for something. Out of doors, the trees were through with turning yellow and leaves were dropping onto the cars parked at the curb. It was my first autumn in Montana, and it seemed to me that in our neighborhood the trees looked like an eastern state would and not at all the way I’d thought Montana would be. No trees is what I’d expected, only open prairie, the land and sky joining almost out of sight.

‘I could get a job teaching swimming,’ my mother said to me on a morning when my father left early and I was looking through the house for my school books. She was standing drinking coffee, looking out the front window, dressed in her yellow bathrobe. ‘A lady at the Red Cross said I could teach privately if I’d teach a class, too.’ She smiled at me and crossed her arms. ‘I’m still a lifesaver.’

‘That sounds good,’ I said.

‘I could teach your dad the backstroke again,’ she said. My mother had taught me to swim, and she was good at that. She had tried to teach my father the backstroke when we lived in Lewiston, but he had tried and failed at it, and she had made a joke about it afterward. ‘The lady said people want to swim in Montana. Why do you think that is? These things always signify a meaning.’

‘What does it mean?’ I said, holding my school books.

She hugged her arms and turned herself a little back and forth as she stood in the window frame watching out.