that went wrong. "How did this become my problem?" she shouted.
"Why aren't you helping? You spend your whole day at the Owl Club.
You act like it's not your responsibility."
Dad explained that he was out trying to earn money. He had all sorts of
prospects that he was on the brink of realizing. Problem was, he needed
cash to make them happen. There was a lot of gold in Battle Mountain,
but it was trapped in the ore. It was not like there were gold nuggets
lying around for the Prospector to sort through. He was perfecting a
technique by which the gold could be leached out of the rock by
processing it with a cyanide solution. But that took money. Dad told
Mom she needed to ask her mother for the money to fund the cyanide-
leaching process he was developing.
"You want me to beg from my mother again?" Mom asked.
"Goddammit, Rose Mary! It's not like we're asking for a handout," he
yelled. "She'd be making an investment."
Grandma was always lending us money, Mom said, and she was sick of
it. Mom told Dad that Grandma had said if we couldn't take care of
ourselves, we could go live in Phoenix, in her house.
"Maybe we should," Mom said.
That got Dad really angry. "Are you saying I can't take care of my own
family?"
"Ask them," Mom snapped.
We kids were sitting on the old passenger benches. Dad turned to me. I
studied the scuff marks on the floor. Their argument continued the next
morning. We kids were downstairs lying in our boxes, listening to them
fighting upstairs. Mom was carrying on about how things had gotten so