Shawn arrived a few minutes before the service, with Emily and Peter and
a little girl I had never met. It was the first time I had been in a room with
him since the night he’d killed Diego. I was tense, but there was no need. He
did not look at me once during the service.
My oldest brother, Tony, sat with my parents, his five children fanning out
in the pew. Tony had a GED and had built a successful trucking company in
Las Vegas, but it hadn’t survived the recession. Now he worked for my
parents, as did Shawn and Luke and their wives, as well as Audrey and her
husband, Benjamin. Now I thought about it, I realized that all my siblings,
except Richard and Tyler, were economically dependent on my parents. My
family was splitting down the middle—the three who had left the mountain,
and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without
high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing.
A year would pass before I would return to Idaho.
A few hours before my flight from London, I wrote to my mother—as I
always did, as I always will do—to ask if she would see me. Again, her
response was swift. She would not, she would never, unless I would see my
father. To see me without him, she said, would be to disrespect her husband.
For a moment it seemed pointless, this annual pilgrimage to a home that
continued to reject me, and I wondered if I should go. Then I received
another message, this one from Aunt Angie. She said Grandpa had canceled
his plans for the next day, and was refusing even to go to the temple, as he
usually did on Wednesdays, because he wanted to be at home in case I came
by. To this Angie added: I get to see you in about twelve hours! But who’s
counting?