Dedication
For my boys.
May your wings spread as wide as our sky.
Epigraph
“I don’t know whether that boy’s strong enough to master what’s around him,” she said to herself. “A man’s got to be stronger’n a bull to get out of the place he was born in.”
—Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Act 1, Scene 1
Act 1, Scene 2
Act 1, Scene 3
Act 1, Scene 4
Act 2, Scene 1
Act 2, Scene 2
Act 2, Scene 3
Act 2, Scene 4
Act 3, Scene 1
Act 3, Scene 2
Act 3, Scene 3
Act 3, Scene 4
Act 3, Scene 5
Act 4, Scene 1
Act 4, Scene 2
Act 4, Scene 3
Act 4, Scene 4
Act 5, Scene 1
Act 5, Scene 2
Act 5, Scene 3
Act 5, Scene 4
Act 5, Scene 5
Act 5, Scene 6
Act 5, Scene 7
Curtain Call
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Carrie La Seur
Copyright
About the Publisher
Act 1, Scene 1
The drive to the ranch for Sunday dinner gave Anthony time to step into a calm he didn’t feel. Doing eighty-five down I-94, he drew on breathing exercises from an otherwise useless voice class as he worked to present a face as fresh and irreproachable as the June day. His mother had been nagging about this visit since he set foot back in Montana two weeks ago. It wasn’t worth putting off any longer, and he needed Sarah’s leftovers to supplement a diet of Doritos and Red Bull. The inevitable questions about what he was doing back home were the price he’d have to pay.
A dirt bridge across the barrow pit and a red pipe gate propped open with a stake were the only landmarks at the turn. The family had a brand Anthony’s grandfather had designed and registered, the letters F, R, and Y linked, but to Anthony it looked like a cancerous P metastasizing. It was tough to get straight on a calf and never lent itself to any grand-sounding name for the ranch.
Anthony rambled the Buick’s squeaking shocks over the last bumps in the long dirt drive that dropped to their protected clearing hemmed by buttes and enlivened by the fresh breath of the creek. The hedges were overgrown above the reach of deer and bare beneath, but the buildings looked in good repair.
Sarah must have seen the dust cloud because she came out to the yard to meet him as she always did, light against the low, dark bulwark of the house. She observed from the front steps with that hand-clasped gaze of maternal hope and concern, loose clothes obscuring the shape of her under a cropped, graying mom haircut that made her look more sixty-two than fifty-two. Every noise the car was not supposed to make drew a wince from her as he pulled up. Ranch women, Anthony thought. They knew exactly what was wrong with your vehicle and judged you for not fixing it yourself.
He killed the engine and collected Sarah’s favorite kind of town bakery bread from the passenger seat. She was already circling toward him with her careful step, eyeing the ding in his windshield that would soon crinkle outward. She moved more slowly than he remembered, but he also recalled how she’d developed an exaggerated limp the year he went away to college and insisted that he spend every freshman break at home to help her “manage.” Anthony’s first winter in New York she’d claimed to have pneumonia and coughed a fury down the phone line but refused to be seen by a doctor. By then he’d learned to speak soothing words, hang up, and get about his life.
During the two—no, going on three years since he’d seen her last, Sarah had shortened, widened, and paled, as if she’d partially melted under the harsh high plains sun. She’d given up the IGA boxed honey blond that didn’t match her eyebrows. Now her hair hung limp and steely in a bob that made her all head and wide glasses. Her clothes made her disappear further: baggy earth tones, flat-heeled ankle boots with the sole starting to flap loose and the leather scuffed beyond repair, good for chores. When he was younger, Anthony had constantly compared his coveralled parents to the neatly groomed families of town kids and found them wanting.
Back then he’d still thought he could cajole her into a smoother presentation, more acceptable in town. Now that he had no more investment in that, he noticed something different. Let me pass quietly was her fashion statement. Don’t notice me. Don’t ask anything of me. He wondered if she’d always been saying that, in a language he couldn’t understand until today, or if she was slipping away from the world a little more with his father gone. For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder how she’d gotten this way. Had life with his father done this, or was it something else? Was it reversible? Was there any way to ask?
Sarah reached out a hand as if to draw him near before she was close enough to reach him.
He stood and stretched as Sarah closed in with her evaluative hug, hands on his ribs to guess his weight like a carnie. Anthony was heavier from stress eating the cheapest food available in New York, and his habits hadn’t changed much in Montana. He was suddenly aware of every degenerate inch of his own appearance: the thrift-store plaid western shirt with ugly greens on grays that he’d been wearing for two days, trashed work boots, worn-out jeans. His hair was limp and uncombed and he was getting thick around the middle. Sarah put a hand to his long red hair and tested its cleanliness before dropping her eyes to the food stain on his shirt, the rip in his jeans, the sum of his visible flaws. But Anthony had grown taller than his mother in junior high. Now he could look down on her and see her purely white roots—a consequence, he thought, of his father’s death three months ago.
“It’s just that your risk of a blowout is so much higher,” she said. “I was reading about it in the paper. You know how I worry about you driving all over by yourself. I wish you’d let me buy you a more reliable car. It’s what your father would have wanted.”
“Still all about what Dad wants, isn’t it?” Even from the grave. The Buick wasn’t the status symbol a full-size pickup would have been but Anthony had bought it himself, a tangible symbol of independence—a hard thing to come by in the Fry household. Every gift from his father came with not as much strings as steel cables to bind him to the ranch. What irony that Dean hadn’t lived to see him slink back in defeat. “The car’s fine, Mom.”
Sarah turned toward the house. “Neal’s here. He’s been helping out since . . . you know.”
At the sound of his uncle’s name, Anthony resisted the hand drawing him forward. Neal. Of course he’d come around now, someone else who’d never measured up to Dean’s standards, or Lewis Fry’s before him. They were all freed by Dean’s death, as disloyal as it was to think it. Or they should be free. Vague, quickly forgotten dreams about Dean’s death had visited Anthony regularly since the accident, as if Dean’s spirit still walked, too ornery to lie still.
“He still working for the city in Hayden?” For almost as long as Anthony could remember, Neal had been biding time, keeping a few cattle on his own small acreage, unable to make peace with being cut out of the family business.
“He took a leave. He’s out here most of the time. Spring’s real busy, you know.”
“What do you want him around for? That old bastard’s messed up in the head.”
“Anthony.” Sarah lowered her chin hard. “I know you two don’t get along but I want you to be nice. We don’t have enough family left to be fighting amongst ourselves. I can’t manage on my
own.”
I can’t manage. That was the real meaning of Neal’s presence—a reproach to Anthony for his absence since Dean’s death. He’d heard the urgent summons and done his craven best to ignore it. He’d almost succeeded.
“I’ll be nice if he is,” he said, in a tone that meant fat chance. “I’m surprised he stuck around for dinner. He never had any use for me.”
Sarah backed a few steps toward the house with a head duck Anthony remembered well—the don’t blame me move. She used it to indicate that some unpopular decision had really been his father’s, but she was the one who’d turned to Neal. She could have hired help—or he could have come home to run things like his cousin Chance had. People had been expecting what Anthony couldn’t give since he was wearing Batman underpants while Chance was the family’s Exhibit A for filial duty. Anthony should probably hate him, but it had never worked that way. Now he looked at the cool cottonwood grove threaded along the creek and the low tawny hills like resting cow dogs and wondered what he’d been fighting so hard.
“Look who’s he-re!” Sarah sang out as she held the screen door. No one answered. The house was dark to Anthony’s eyes after the brilliance outside—dark wooden furniture; dark patterned carpet in brown, orange, and green; dark beams overhead. They’d have to use this furniture forever because no one would ever buy it from them and that was the only way a Fry could be convinced to spend money on anything new.
The interior was a cave, but a safe one. He recalled the feeling of stumbling inside on a winter’s day half snow-blind to the smell of baking and the blast of the woodstove, a sense of being hugged tight. The smell of meat cooking made a magnet of the kitchen. Anthony could hear the shower—Neal cleaning up from whatever work he’d been at. As far as they were from any services, it was familiar to have people in the shower at odd hours washing off dirty jobs. Hired hands used the bunkhouse stall, but family had house privileges.
The doors stood open onto the back deck. The table there wasn’t set, but the dining room table was. Sarah moved to the kitchen sink to finish tearing lettuce into a colander for the salad only she would eat, if history was any guide.
“Aren’t we eating outside?” Anthony asked. “I thought you liked that.”
“Oh no,” she answered with a nervous laugh as she opened the oven to check the roast. “Neal says we’re going to eat inside like God-fearing Presbyterians. I leave the doors open, though. He doesn’t seem to mind that. Isn’t it funny?”
Hilarious, Anthony thought. Dean had enforced his ideas about everything from the right brand of saddle soap to which fish were worth eating, but he never minded meals outside. They had all liked the sound of the creek. Anthony’s irritation shifted slightly into a more protective place. His own reluctance to return to the ranch had driven Sarah to depend on Neal, and already he was lording it over her. And now Neal was a God-fearing Presbyterian? There was a new one.
Sarah’s laugh faded as the bathroom door opened. Neal emerged from the hall in jeans, carrying a white T-shirt, brushing water from the flattop buzz cut he’d worn all his life. He nodded to Sarah as he passed through the kitchen and she smiled. It was admirable how well he’d kept himself up, but Neal’s shape was also a melancholy reminder of Dean. It was remarkable how two men could resemble each other so much and so little. The difference was all in the eyes. Both had firm grips and terrifying glares, but Dean had been capable of a twinkle when he wasn’t trying to turn Anthony into a die-cast model of himself. Horses and dogs recognized some openness in him and loved him as a firm but benevolent master. His dry wit made him the center of any gathering. And most of all, Lewis had trusted him. That simple fact had shaped Dean’s life—and therefore Neal’s and Anthony’s.
“High time you turned up,” Neal said. His voice was all in the back of his throat, clipped, barely any lip movement. Dean had talked that way, too, like each word cost him.
“I see you made yourself at home.” Anthony didn’t quite face his uncle as he got off his retort. Despite equaling him in height now, Anthony had never stopped being a little afraid of this brooding presence that had stalked the edges of his childhood. It wasn’t that Neal had ever laid a hand on him. He hadn’t. But Neal spooked him.
“I grew up here same as you did.”
Anthony looked up to see Neal’s eyes, if there was any humor banked there at their common fate. Nothing. Neal pulled on the T-shirt, his white belly contrasting with his neck and arms. Rather than the permanent lower-arm tan Neal and most men around here had, Anthony’s skin was pale and hatched along the blue veins of his left forearm with latitude and longitude coordinates for the ranch, Missoula, and New York City—the only places he’d ever lived. He’d need another for Billings if he stayed much longer.
Neal kept walking stiff shouldered to the living room without any gesture of greeting. This was the Neal that Anthony remembered—burdened, put-upon, never got a fair break to hear him tell it, so set on proving himself that he never let the world offer any generosity or imprint on him a touch of empathy. As a result, he saw none. Neal had shut himself off from a community that only functioned—only survived—by interdependence. That closure was the root of his failure, Anthony saw now, as a man and as a rancher. This insight was quite recent. Anthony had earned it the hard way, as all true seeing comes, on the anonymous streets of New York where he’d ached at the lack of hometown eyes upon him.
While he lived there he chatted often with the elderly Dominican ladies, Rosa and Carmen, who spent evenings on a stoop up the street from his building. He brought them little offerings from his restaurant jobs—sweets and fresh bread—so they would remember his name and watch for him. Querido Antonio, they called him. Our dear boy. How was he doing? How was the audition? He answered in broken high school Spanish, and they encouraged him through painful rejections. How he needed that, and more the worse things got.
He fell into their concern as the only solace—a facsimile of home—while his hopes were gradually incinerated. Broadway had been a first chance to live as his real self, to try out what he believed himself to be for people he considered worthy to judge him. The failure of that act, the indifference and even hostility of the audience, had left him feeling like a shade in a world of flesh and blood. In the end, he didn’t exist in the way he’d believed himself to exist. He was something less than that. It had taken the matter-of-fact cruelty of New York to show him.
Now that he was back home Anthony resented the small-town surveillance network of Hayden and the ranch country and the way Montana kept a finger on him across hundreds of miles of open country by way of dispersed friends and relations, but in New York he’d been unsettled to discover how diminished he felt outside that tight web. On gray sidewalks under gray skies, hemmed in and claustrophobic, he’d become part of the scenery and almost ceased to exist.
It was both humiliating and a great kindness when Town Hall Theater in Billings had offered him a job overseeing their summer camp program and given him the excuse he needed to come home. It was difficult to accept what he felt sure was charity—his high school drama teacher was on the board—but it would have been worse to have no friend to give it. After all the struggles of the last few years and the craw-stuck reality that he wasn’t cut out to live his dream of a career as a stage actor, there was a purifying peace in acceptance. He was at that place in the redemption drama where the boxer lies bleeding on the mat, hearing the count at a distance through ringing ears, trying to find a reason to get up. They don’t tell you, he thought, how good the mat feels.
Sarah was reorganizing the kitchen counter to make room for hot dishes coming out of the oven. She shoved a stack of gardening and plant books toward Anthony, who picked up the one on top.
“Plants of the Rocky Mountains,” he read aloud. “Are you planning to start gardening, Mom?”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Don’t act like you haven’t watched me kill every green thing that ever arrived here.”
Anthony smiled. “You�
�re kind of a local legend.” Gardening here was as much a proud womanly tradition as quilting and baking. Sarah’s rejection of it was one of the few glints of rebellion he’d ever seen in her.
She kept moving, handing off dishes to Anthony. “Neighbors have had some sick cattle this spring so I was looking up weeds that bother livestock. You know how I am, can’t tell Canada thistle from knapweed. Your dad always kept track of that sort of thing. I guess it’s time I learned.”
“Are we having weed problems?” Weeds were a matter of furious concern among the ranchers. Invasive plants could quickly take over whole pastures, and some weeds were poisonous to livestock if they ate too much too fast. The book in his hands fell open to a page featuring wild carrot, Daucus carota—Queen Anne’s lace. You had to be careful with it, he recalled, because it could look like other plants that weren’t edible, although he couldn’t remember anymore what those were.
Sarah shrugged as she eased a cheese-and-potato dish onto a trivet. “Some. It was a real wet spring. I ran into Jenna Tall Grass at the store and she said they’ve been having trouble with their horses. We’ve got a lot of money wandering around on hoof out there.”
“Dad could’ve recited every entry and told us where it shows up in our pastures,” Anthony said. The voice was at his shoulder even then, reminding him of what he ought to know and hadn’t bothered with. Neither Dean nor Neal had gone to college, but Anthony had rarely found a gap in their knowledge of the world they inhabited, from animal husbandry to agronomy, botany, bookkeeping, and mechanical engineering.
“I’ve been on the lookout, Sarah,” Neal said from where he stood clicking through channels. “Haven’t spotted anything on this place. We’ve sprayed good. Indians’ll let anything grow.”
Anthony gritted his teeth at the slam against the Tall Grasses—Jenna was a friend—and reminded himself that Neal liked to rile him just for the pleasure of seeing him sputter. He started to offer to ride out and look, then realized that he was falling into the habitual role of rancher, fretting about weeds—exactly the trap Sarah was setting. He’d promised himself he’d check in, not get sucked in. He shut his mouth and helped her carry the feast to the table. It was far too much food for three people, but he’d carry a good share home. Sunday dinner was a meal plan to extend over many days, enough carbs and fat and protein for a week, a little show of certain nourishment in an uncertain world.
The Weight of an Infinite Sky Page 1