amount next year.” I bought a new Sunday dress.
I’d believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did
was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I
said I would never again work for my father, I believed it.
I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn’t the
first time I left home to go to Buck’s Peak. That night I had entered my
father’s house as an intruder. It was a shift in mental language, a
surrendering of where I was from.
My own words confirmed it. When other students asked where I was
from, I said, “I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had
to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth.
When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s
never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words “I’m
from Idaho” until I’d left it.