money. The house was massive. The home I’d grown up in had had five
bedrooms; now it had been expanded in all directions and looked as though it
had at least forty.
It would only be a matter of time, I thought, before Dad started using the
money to prepare for the End of Days. I imagined the roof lined with solar
panels, laid out like a deck of cards. “We need to be self-sufficient,” I
imagined Dad would say as he dragged the panels across his titanic house. In
the coming year, Dad would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying
equipment and scouring the mountain for water. He didn’t want to be
dependent on the Government, and he knew Buck’s Peak must have water, if
he could only find it. Gashes the size of football fields would appear at the
mountain base, leaving a desolation of broken roots and upturned trees where
once there had been a forest. He was probably chanting, “Got to be self-
reliant” the day he climbed into a crawler and tore into the fields of satin
wheat.
Grandma-over-in-town died on Mother’s Day.
I was doing research in Colorado when I heard the news. I left immediately
for Idaho, but while traveling realized I had nowhere to stay. It was then that
I remembered my aunt Angie, and that my father was telling anyone who
would listen that she had put his name on a terrorist watch list. Mother had
cast her aside; I hoped I could reclaim her.
Angie lived next door to my grandfather, so again I parked along the white
picket fence. I knocked. Angie greeted me politely, the way Grandpa had
done. It was clear that she had heard much about me from my mother and
father in the past five years.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “I’ll forget everything my dad has said about
you, if you’ll forget everything he’s said about me.” She laughed, closing her
eyes and throwing back her head in a way that nearly broke my heart, she
looked so much like my mother.
I stayed with Angie until the funeral.
In the days before the service, my mother’s siblings began to gather at their
childhood home. They were my aunts and uncles, but some of them I hadn’t
seen since I was a child. My uncle Daryl, who I barely knew, suggested that
his brothers and sisters should spend an afternoon together at a favorite
restaurant in Lava Hot Springs. My mother refused to come. She would not
go without my father, and he would have nothing to do with Angie.