Page 1 of Grown-Up Second Chance

Chapter One

A bison stood in the middle of the road.

“What are you going to do?” I hissed at my sister Kathleen.

“Wait it out.”

“Can’t you just nudge it a little with the RV?” It had been a long day.

“It’s not a cat.” Kathleen turned to look at me. “You have been out of Montana a while.”

“Oh? And just how many buffalo roamed across the ranch while I’ve been gone?”

“There’s the one by the bank.”

“It’s a statue.”

Kathleen shrugged.

The bison turned its massive, horny head and looked at us.

“You’d better not charge us,” I told it. “We just bought this rig.”

The animal studied me as if considering its choices.

It was a long few minutes.

On the couch behind us, Liz continued her valium-induced sleep, totally unaware of the crisis.

With a snort, the beast turned its head and trotted into the vegetation.

Kathleen put the RV in gear and continued down the highway toward the first stop of our epic adventure: a park in West Yellowstone.

I had to admire the way my gray-haired sister handled our new-to-us motorhome. It was forty-three feet long, and we were towing Liz’s beloved forest green Jeep so we’d have a car once we got to our destination. A lifetime of wrestling incalcitrant farm machinery into line had given Kathleen an edge up over us when it came to getting a license to drive the rig. It had taken me three tries for a license. Liz had given up after two.

And we’d let her stop trying. Just like we’d always let her take the easy road. Even when we were kids we protected her from the hard knocks of life, somehow knowing her life was always going to be difficult in spite of our efforts.

I shook off memories and indulged in the scenery. Montana would never get old for me. It was home, no matter how long I’d lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this stretch between Bozeman and West Yellowstone, the pine trees descended close to the road, except for the huge expanse of the Big Sky resort with its ski slopes and resort community which we’d left behind a half hour ago.

“Maybe we should try skiing next winter,” I suggested to Kathleen.

“I thought the whole point was to get away from snow,” she said. “Although why you need to do that, I can’t imagine. You haven’t spent a real winter here in decades.”

“We visited Tahoe in the winter,” I shot back.

She just turned her stink eye on me.

It was an ability she’d inherited from our mother, then honed to a high performance with her own two boys.

I shut up and stared at the trees.

“Where is the turnoff?” she asked a while later.

After consulting the map on my phone, comparing it with the paper map we carried because Liz didn’t trust phone directions, and verifying it by calculating the time we’d traveled from the last small town consisting of a post office, a church, and a bar, I told her.

“About twenty minutes on the left.”

“And you double-checked the reservation? They’re expecting us? Because we’re not going to find anywhere else around Yellowstone in mid-June.”

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