The Summer Son Read Online Free PDF

high school. Nice girl. A really nice girl.” From the deep-voiced way he said it, I could guess what he meant.
     
     
    Jerry and Denise drove me back to the trailer. In the parking lot, he stopped and said, “Mitch, don’t press too hard with Dad, OK? Just be cool about the motorcycle and stuff like that. Things are kind of tough right now.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’m not going to get into it now. Just keep your head down, do what you’re told, and don’t give him a lot of problems. Can you do that?”
    “Sure.”
    “Good. I’ll see you in the morning. Early.”
    I climbed out of the back seat, and Jerry threw the car into reverse and backed out to the street.
    I headed for the trailer and wondered what might be waiting for me on the other side of the door.

BILLINGS, MONTANA | SEPTEMBER 17, 2007
     
    I SLEPT ALL THE WAY to Denver, then stared out the window of the smaller jet for the hour-plus ride to Billings. Standing at the baggage carousel in Billings for the second time in four months, I felt as fresh as could be expected. In the face of uncertainty, that gave me heart.
    I had called Cindy as the plane taxied to the gate. By rote, we said, “I’m sorry” to each other a lot these days, even if we didn’t always know what we were apologizing for. I offered my regrets and sought a last dose of bucking up.
    “I’m still wondering if this is the right thing to do.”
    “It is,” she said. “And as a practical matter, it doesn’t really make any difference now. You’re there.”
    “That’s comforting.”
    “Mitch, just stay on topic with him. Find out what’s wrong, and make your peace. It’s long overdue.”
    “That’s easy for you to say. You act as though there’s peace to be had.”
    “Are you arguing with me because you’re afraid to argue with him?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Don’t argue, then. Just talk to him. Find out what’s bugging him. You’re the bigger man here. You’re smarter, and you’re more mature.”
    “Yeah, yeah. You’re right.”
    “Now that’s my big, smart man.” The breathy way she said it was playful, something she hadn’t been in a long while.
    I wished I could go home.
     
     
    Behind the wheel of the rental car, I plunged into the heart of Billings.
    Despite my attitude about being there, I liked the city. My feelings about it came with baggage, a whole lot of it, but I always wondered how things might have been different for me, and for all of us, had Mom never left. Billings had been my home for the first three years of my life, and it’s where I spent stretches of some childhood summers. This created an odd duality in which I knew Billings and was a stranger to it.
    Until Mom spirited us away to Olympia, we lived in a small ranch-style house on the south side of Interstate 90. When I saw it on the visit a few months earlier, it was much as it seemed in my foggy memories, save for a new coat of paint and a chain-link fence in front where none had been before. Billings, as a whole, was scarcely the same place. Three decades of what some folks refer to as progress had transformed it into a mini-metropolis. But the place where we lived, near the Yellowstone River and in the shadow of Sacrifice Cliff, was the Billings that time forgot.
    But I wasn’t headed to that old house, nor to the cattle ranch that Dad and Marie bought in the late seventies. Those were places of a different time and of different people. No longer the self-styled drilling baron, Dad puttered around a double-wide in the middle of town, playing out his days. No longer a wide-eyed, admiring son, I was just a guy in a rented Ford Focus, pushing my way toward an uncertain visit, burdened by fears in the present and thoughts of the past.
     
     
    There was no sneaking up on the old man. Dad pulled back the curtain in his kitchen, alerted by my car as it spat gravel. He eased down the stairs as I retrieved my duffel bag from the trunk. His gray hair down to a few wisps, his pronounced