HOWLERS by Kent Harrington Page B

would go back to school in San Francisco. As soon as Robin came, she would tell him. As much as she loved Timberline, she loved San Francisco, too. The city was full of young people and exciting. Timberline would always be home, but the City would be where she’d make a life for herself.
    And I want to be a doctor. Medical school has to come first.
    She could see Mount Baldy in the distance through the white haze of snow. They’d gone up to the state park and camped as a family before her mother had been diagnosed, three years before. Lacy pulled her hair down, unhooking it from the clip, and turned toward the coat rack by the front door.
    The coat rack, with its pile of coats and hats, was one of her earliest memories from childhood. The rack said more about the people who lived there than anything else about the house. It was piled with weather-beaten cowboy hats, yellow slickers, jean jackets, Patagonia vests, and one of her father’s extra black-leather service holsters. She smiled and walked to the rack. Fishing through the layers of heavy coats, slickers and sweaters, one of her grandfather’s sheepskin-lined jackets fell on the floor. Then Lacy found it: the simple white windbreaker her mother had worn on their last camping trip, near the bottom of the pile.
    Her mother had worn it on that last trip to the hospital, too. Lacy had found it and brought it home after she’d died. Looking at it, she remembered her mother running along a creek on the camping trip with a fishing rod in her hand, so alive. It was a week before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, before the shadow of death stalked her mother and all of them, changing their lives forever. Her mother had talked to her from right there by the front door as she slid her jacket on, not saying that she was going to the hospital. Lacy, on her iPad, had missed what her mother had said—something about fixing dinner in case she was late.
    Her father’s empty holster fell on the floor at her feet, startling her. She picked it up and hung it back on one of the crowded old-fashioned wooden pegs. She took her mother’s coat to the couch and sat with it on her lap. She watched the snow fall from the window on the paddock outside, holding the coat.
    “Mom, I’m pregnant and I don’t want to be,” she said aloud. She wanted to cry but decided she couldn’t, that it wasn’t right to cry.

    The doorbell rang while Lacy was carrying her suitcase out to her Volkswagen bug. She dropped the suitcase in the hall and opened the door.
    Robin Wood was standing on the porch. His Chevy truck was parked up by the barn.
    “Your dad called. Have you told him? He didn’t say a thing.” The young veterinarian was wearing blue jeans and a down coat. He was handsome, stocky, and boyish, with black hair cut very short. They’d known each other since he’d opened a practice in town four years ago. It had been one of those passionate affairs, all about sex, laughter, and weekend trips to visit her in the City, and not about getting married, until the problem had come up. Because of her mother’s illness they’d kept their affair a secret from everyone.
    “No,” Lacy said. “I can’t tell him.”
    “Well, I think he should know now that we’ve decided to get married.” Wood smiled. The young man stepped in the door. She’d continued to keep the affair a secret from her family because she didn’t think her father needed the stress. Since her mother’s death, she had tried to protect him from anything that might worry him. She hadn’t told him that Sharon was smoking pot or hanging out with a rough crowd. She hadn’t told her father any of her own problems: adjusting to a high-pressure graduate school, and living in the big city for the first time in her life away from her family.
    And she certainly hadn’t told him she was sleeping with Robin Wood, or that he wanted to marry her. After hearing she was pregnant, Robin had told her that an abortion was “out of the