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Snowfall had come early this year. A blanket of white covered the peaks and valleys of my family's property. Icicles hung from the rafters. At night, a lonesome wind whistled through the firs and pines. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, the noises of the night reminded me of Annie. I could almost hear her calling out to me.
Atticus, come play with me.
Memories of the time before she moved away haunted me to this day, even though decades had passed since I last saw her. Sometimes, as I rounded the curve in the path that led from my newly built dwelling to our family house, I almost expected to see Annie standing there waiting for me. Had the ghosts of the children we once were remained behind, stuck in time?
No, they were fixed only in my mind. Especially since I’d returned home.
I trudged through several feet of fluffy, newly fallen snow, breathing in air that smelled of woodsmoke. After a snowfall everything seemed too quiet and still, as if every living plant and animal had decided to take a long nap.
We reached the creek, where Scout liked to stop for a drink. The edges had iced over but toward the middle the water looked like a well-shaken martini, with flakes of ice floating on the top. Using a stick, I cracked the ice, breaking it into pieces. Scout barked a thanks and then lapped from the frigid water.
A few remaining red leaves on a maple fluttered in the breeze. They were the color of Annie’s hair. Would I ever be able to think of anything or anyone else when I saw that coppery hue? Apparently not.
When Scout had had enough, she looked up at me, as if the frosty water had surprised her, even though she’d had the sameexperience the day before. A squirrel rustled a branch in a nearby tree. Scout ran to it, barking at the creature who taunted her from the branch of a fir tree.
“Come on, girl. Let’s go home and get warm.”
Still fixated on the squirrel, Scout paid me no mind. I trudged back through the snow, knowing she would eventually catch up to me. Trusting people was one thing. Dogs, on the other hand, never let a guy down.
Soon, she was by my side. We followed our footsteps back toward home. By the time we reached the door into the mudroom, snow caked Scout’s fur.
The minute we were inside, I grabbed a towel to dry my dog, but she got away and rolled onto her back, depositing snow on the mudroom floor. After she’d exhausted herself from all the flailing about, she ran out to the living room to flop in front of the fireplace for a snooze.
Now that she’d had her walk, she’d sleep for a good hour. In the meantime, I showered and prepared to go down to my home office to check on a few business items. Since I’d sold my company, I focused only on my charity work and a few board positions I’d taken at the bequest of close friends. Other than that, my life as a silicon tech developer was over. If I never saw another piece of code, I wouldn’t be sad. Twenty-hour days at a start-up were a thing of the past, and I had a big bank account to show for it. The drive and ambition had dissipated after my big windfall. I guess that’s what money did to a person. All I wanted for the rest of my life was to give back through my philanthropic work and to hang with my brothers and parents.
And fall in love. Raise a family of my own with the right woman.
Where was she?
I wasn’t the only one of us to have left and come home. Rafferty had graduated from medical school last year and bought Dr. Wilson’s practice in Bluefern, a move that hadsurprised us all. For as long as I could remember, he’d been talking about becoming a surgeon. Instead, he’d changed his course and focused on internal medicine, which meant he was done with school much sooner than he’d anticipated. Rafferty usually picked the most difficult paths in life, so it had been a shock when he’d come home to run a family practice. Mama was thrilled, of course, just as she was about my return. Now all five of us were back together in the land of the endless sky.
As a kid I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could get out of Montana to seek my fortune. During the years I built my company in the unforgiving climate of the tech industry, getting back home became the new goal. However, I wasn’t about to go home without enough money to take care of myself and my family for however long we were on the earth. Since I was a little boy listening to my mother tapping on calculator keys, constantly balancing what she could pay and when, I’d had one desire. Take care of my family.
When one grows up poor, the scarcity’s etched into you, like a tattoo no one wants. For me, I had not been able to get rid of the thought in the back of my mind—what if it all goes away?
Focusing on keeping one’s world safe and predictable shouldn’t have come as a surprise. My father had run off with my mother’s best friend, and they’d both ended up dead. Murder-suicide. That’s what the newspaper had called it. But there was so much more to the story. Betrayal. Abandonment of young children. Annie’s mother had decided to leave her and run away with my father. Rex Sharp, I’m sure, never gave one thought to his five boys when he decided to have an affair with his wife’s best friend. He was not that kind of man.
That one horrific day had changed everything, leaving me with major abandonment issues. I could not trust anyone but my brothers and my parents. My primary thought when it came to relationships? When will this person leave me?
Like Annie.
Annie had never come back to us. She and her father had made a new life in Texas. We’d continued to write letters for a year or so after she moved, but as time went on our correspondence grew less and less frequent. By the time we were fourteen, our letters had stopped altogether.
I'm assuming, like my family, they'd gone on with their lives and hopefully healed. It seems impossible to think about now, all this time later, that anyone could ever recover from what happened between Annie's mother and my father.
Yet people are resilient. My mother married my stepfather, Jasper Moon, and we became a new kind of family when he adopted my brothers and me. Pop had been a buttoned-up banker who liked to remodel houses and bake pies when he’d fallen for my mom and her little sons, God bless him. Who does that? Takes on a woman and her five young boys? All under the age of eleven; all suffering trauma and heartbreak.
After a year of dating, he asked my mother to marry him and suggested he adopt all five of us boys. No one could blame my mother for falling in love with this selfless, fun, pie-making man with Italian leather loafers. We didn’t see his type around western Montana often. But we were sure glad he showed up when he did.
He’d told me once that he was very certain God had put him on this earth to love my mother and her boys. The pain caused by my real father would never full dissipate. However, Jasper Moon had loved most of it away.
Now he wore cowboy boots like the rest of us.
Later,I had the refrigerator open looking for inspiration for something to make for dinner when my phone buzzed.
It was a text from Mama to our family group chat.
Family meeting and dinner tonight. My house 7 p.m. #OperationSlurfpig.
