When the semester ended I returned to Buck’s Peak. In a few weeks

BYU would post grades; then I’d know if I could return in the fall.

I filled my journals with promises that I would stay out of the
junkyard. I needed money—Dad would have said I was broker than the
Ten Commandments—so I went to get my old job back at Stokes. I
turned up at the busiest hour in the afternoon, when I knew they’d be
understaffed, and sure enough, the manager was bagging groceries
when I found him. I asked if he’d like me to do that, and he looked at
me for all of three seconds, then lifted his apron over his head and
handed it to me. The assistant manager gave me a wink: she was the
one who’d suggested I ask during the rush. There was something about
Stokes—about its straight, clean aisles and the warm people who
worked there—that made me feel calm and happy. It’s a strange thing
to say about a grocery store, but it felt like home.

Dad was waiting for me when I came through the back door. He saw
the apron and said, “You’re working for me this summer.”

“I’m working at Stokes,” I said.
“Think you’re too good to scrap?” His voice was raised. “This is your
family. You belong here.”

Dad’s face was haggard, his eyes bloodshot. He’d had a spectacularly
bad winter. In the fall, he’d invested a large sum of money in new
construction equipment—an excavator, a man lift and a welding trailer.
Now it was spring and all of it was gone. Luke had accidentally lit the
welding trailer on fire, burning it to the ground; the man lift had come
off a trailer because someone—I never asked who—hadn’t secured it
properly; and the excavator had joined the scrap heap when Shawn,
pulling it on an enormous trailer, had taken a corner too fast and rolled