We were supposed to be at the house, sitting down at the table, by nine o’clock sharp, but when Ollie and I woke up that morning, Bear was gone. He’d left a note pinned to the inside of the teepee flap: Be back soon. I turned it over, looking for more of an explanation, but the other side was blank. Ollie and I waited until we couldn’t wait any longer, then we walked the quarter mile to Zeb and Franny’s without him. They lived in a two-story farmhouse with a wraparound front porch and rooster-red shutters. Wind chimes and hummingbird feeders dangled from the eaves. They’d bought the house and eighty acres right after they were married. The plan, Franny told me once when I asked her why she and Zeb lived all alone in such a big house, was to fill the extra space with kids, and eventually grandkids, and, if God saw fit, great-grandkids, but their first daughter died of pneumonia when she was still a baby, and their second daughter died, too, when she was older, after falling off a horse.
