position on the northern slope of the Oakridge basin it gave a view back across the town. Beds of flowers and small shrubs had been newly planted against the enclosing wooden fence. They were tidy and well cared for. Stan saw me looking at them and puffed up.

“I do the garden.”

“Really?”

“I’ve got green fingers.”

He fluttered his fingers in front of my face and began to point out his work.

“These are blue pearl. They flower in spring and summer and they like the sun. This one here is a peace lily, you have to give it a lot of water.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

Stan tried to hold it in but couldn’t. “It’s my job.”

“You got a job?”

“At the garden center. I catch the bus. I’ve been working all year.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“So it was a surprise.”

Below us on the floor of the valley, Old Town—Oakridge’s original Gold Rush heart of 1800s wooden buildings—glowed whitely at the center of town. In the distance, further south, a thin curve of the Swallow River glittered.

“Stan, do you ever see Marla around?”

“Sure.”

“How does she look?”

“She looks good.”

“Does she ever say anything about me?”

“Of course she does, Johnny. She always asks how you are.”

Later, I walked up the street and showed Stan my pickup and moved it closer to the house. I carried my things inside and went upstairs. I’d been traveling solidly for a day and a half and I was tired.

Despite the sunlight that fell dustily through the windows, my bedroom was cold. When I was twenty-one I’d moved out of the house to live with Marla and my father had stripped it bare. It had been empty ever since and on the day of my return all I could find of the time I had spent there was a set of grubby outlines on the cream walls where my posters had been. A single bed had been placed under one of the windows and there was a small table beside it. There was nothing else.

I had not expected a magically reconstructed teenage cocoon, but the barrenness of the room was dispiriting. Like my father not being there to meet me.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, I could hear a bird singing and further away the occasional distant grinding of an engine as someone drove up the slope from town. The scent of the carpet, the walls, the dusty air … All of it closed about me and for a moment I was able to force a sense of belonging. But it wouldn’t hold and I was left with what the room most meant to me—sitting, like this, every night when I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty, staring at nothing, wishing that I had not left Stan alone the day we went up to Tunney Lake.

I lay down on the bed and after a while I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 2

In the late afternoon I went downstairs and my father was home. There was a smell of Chinese food in the house and in the dining room the table was set with plates and chopsticks and cartons of takeout. My father had just finished lighting a single candle on a cake that had the words Welcome Home John iced across it.

Stan made a trumpeting sound when he saw me and clapped his hands and yelled, “Heeeeere’s Johnny!”

My father hugged me and made a big show of me being home, but I could hear his throat constrict as he told me how good it was to see me again.

I had memories of him being loving, of being swung up onto his shoulders and spun around. But that was a long way back when I was a child and still too young to demand much of his emotions. What I remembered more was his withdrawal of affection as I’d grown older, how the small badges of encouragement and pride and worth had disappeared one by one.

Later, no doubt, there were reasons for him to be disappointed. I worked only when I felt like it, I drank too much. And, of course, there was Stan and Tunney Lake. But before this, what can a boy in the first years of adolescence do that turns his father away from him? It took me until I was an adult and had had time to observe him with other people to realize this distance between us stemmed not from any transgression I was guilty of but rather from the fact that he was simply incapable