Precisely right. Five days ago, Dad found Grandpa in his metal lawn chair, where he’d been spending each desert sunset and the cooling hour after, just sitting and breathing through his oxygen mask. It had been furiously hot, no rain for weeks, every parched inch of land one spark from inferno. Time to start the third cutting of hay. Jackrabbits swarmed, gnawing through barley and haystacks faster than anyone could poison or shoot them.
His father came into Jason’s room that night. Which he never did. Jason was lying on his bed reading The Hobbit, bare feet hanging off the end of the mattress. Bilbo and the dwarves had just entered the forest of Mirkwood. A dark tangle of menace. Dad sat on the bed and stared at the wood-paneled wall, gray cheeks slack. Outside, a wheel line repeated its watery skirch. Above them, trophies from livestock sales and Little League sat on shelves, tiny golden calves and batters, and images of Evel Knievel — in black and white, in color, crashing and landing — papered every wall.
“Your grandpa’s gone,” his father said, and Jason thought for a moment that he meant Grandpa had traveled somewhere, maybe Boise or Salt Lake. “I’m going to need you to be strong for your mother.”
Dad sighed, and dropped his gaze to the floor. Jason waited for the moment to arrive — grief, heartbreak — but it simply did not. He felt tired. A little sad, a little hungry. He thought he spied a tearish gleam at the corner of Dad’s eye and was glad for it. Jason had seen him show emotion only during testimony meeting, when he was displaying his deep and abiding faith for the ward. Jason wanted something to have the power to make him sad.
“Sorry, Dad,” he said.
Dad turned, and his eyes were shiny but dry, the same glinty nuggets he trained on Jason when he screwed around during church or was late feeding calves.
Dad shook his head. “It was time,” he said.
Time. What made it time? What made the time any better than, say, one day later? Or one day earlier? Why not another thirty-seven hours, or forty-two hours, or fifty-six hours and twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds? What made it so right that Grandpa didn’t get another year, five years? Ten years? It was time. He felt surrounded by people who would swallow any goddamned thing and smile.
Boyd walks the motorcycle over. Jason won’t do it. Not today. He feels relieved that he can put this off for another time. Out of everyone in the world, only Boyd understands him correctly, and this is how Jason knows that Boyd will not ride him about chickening out.
Boyd stops, his enormous head cocked and a gaze of evaluation trained on Jason.
He says, “Get on the bike, man. You can’t be a pussy your whole life.”
• • •
Here is how, according to the story Jason’s mother told him on every birthday, he became the sole only child out of all the Mormon kids he knew:
Twenty-three hours of labor. A night and day and night of pain and desperation. Prayers and lamentations. A period of thirteen minutes when everyone in the delivery room believed he had died, followed by his birth, breach, with the umbilical cord wrapped snugly around his neck. Blue above and red below. Then, a revival. “A miracle. You’re my miracle boy.” But he was the last of the children, for reasons that were never fully clear — a complication, a risk to his mother’s life. More children would have been unsafe. So he was the only one, and though he was surrounded by families of five, six, seven, eight, all these fertile righteous families, he could believe only that everyone was really just like him: the only one, the miracle of their own lives.
• • •
Jason lands the first jump, crashes the second. It is afternoon when he arrives home, elbow bleeding and shoulder aching, to find Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Ben have arrived from Pocatello, with their six kids in the converted airport van. Jason parks the bike in the shed and pokes around in the dusty heat, avoiding going in. The gloomy swelter of the shed forces itself on him, sends stinging trickles of sweat into his scrapes and cuts.
He comes out as a rusty gold Nova tears into the drive. Uncle Roy. Here from Boise. A Jack Mormon, never married, suspected of illicit pleasures like coffee and beer. Jason’s favorite.
“Hey, kid,” Roy hollers, elbow out the window as the car engine rattles and ticks into silence. “Staying out of trouble?”
“Not really.”
“Cool, man.”
He clambers out, slams the door, puts his hands on his hips, and surveys the place. Soft body on a big frame. His belly strains against a thinning terry-cloth shirt and his fraying bell-bottom jeans nearly cover his feet. Face thick and happy, with curly sideburns and an unruly nest of hair and a grin that makes you feel he knows where all the good times are hidden.
He comes over, rubs a hand in Jason’s hair and hugs him hard, slaps his back, and holds him with one arm around the shoulder, tightly.
“Sucks about the old man,” Roy says.
“Really sucks,” Jason says.
“Just goddamn lousy,” Roy says. Jason’s eyes sting and tighten. Roy adds, “This next part’s gonna be worse yet. Watching all the boo-hoo.”
Roy pats his shoulder, releases him.
“Dean here?”
Dean. Uncle Dean. Supposedly, Jason met his uncle Dean once, when he was two or three, but all he knows is that Dean and his family live down in Arizona or Utah, with their million kids and strange ways. Old-school Mormons, fundamentalists. Just how old school he couldn’t have said, but Dean lives down where the polygamists live. One of the places. They’re up in British Columbia and down in Arizona and Mexico and even, a few of them, in Hagerman, just a few miles away in the Snake River Canyon. Little pockets of polygamists. They’re an embarrassment to good, normal Mormons, and Jason’s parents have made their own nervousness about Dean clear in their cautious avoidance of the subject. He is the signal omission from all their talk of family, family, family. The sacred family.
“I guess not,” Jason says.
“You’d know it if he was.”
“What? Why?”
Roy scrunches his features, as if he can’t quite calculate the answer. “He’ll be here soon enough. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.” He pats Jason aggressively on the shoulder. “Okay. Let’s go greet the fam damily.”
They go in. Hugs, kisses. Jason’s cousins are mostly younger. While they’re all saying shy hellos, Aunt Jenna and her five kids arrive in their station wagon from Salt Lake City. She has left her husband, Verl, behind. He’ll come up in time for the funeral tomorrow. The house is suddenly so full you can’t put a foot down. Cousins crowd into Jason’s room, toss down sleeping bags. Jason’s mother has put box fans in the windows, shoving waves of dank air, and laid out a buffet of cold cuts and salads on the kitchen counter, the start of the continuous meal that marks all family gatherings — the steady, informal eating, broken only by the moments of formalized eating. People stand around the counter, picking at the food, eating off trays, leaving the paper plates mostly untouched.