THEY SAT ON A GIRDER FACING WEST BENEATH THE LEWIS AND Clark Bridge. They’d come here to search for her initials. Erin had worried that maybe the letters would be gone by now, painted over or faded from existence. She’d been ten years old when she etched them into the support beam. It was the year her father had returned from prison, but still three years before her mother went missing. The letters were here, though, as if she’d placed them only yesterday, and Robbie took the opportunity to scratch his own initials into the beam with the same knife he’d used as a kid to etch his name into the base of the tree behind his house. The blade was dull and rusty, but he worked with a patient diligence as the low-hanging sun reflected off the surface of the water and the hawks circled in the air above them.
“Will you stay in Wolf Point,” Robbie asked her, “or do you need to get back to Colorado?”
“I don’t know,” she told him. “I’ve been thinking about selling my practice in Fort Collins, and maybe starting a new one here on the outskirts of town.”
“You’ve got the farm,” he said. “I could help you with that if you’d like me to.”
She nodded. It was hard to see that far into the future. For now she intended to spend time with her father.
“How do you feel,” she asked, “now that you’re in recovery?”
“I feel like I have my life back,” he told her. “The next step is knowing what to do with it.”
“What’ve you decided?”
Robbie folded the pocketknife and held it in the palm of his hand. “I’ve decided not to take it for granted. I’ve decided to spend time with the people who are most important to me.”
“Me too,” she said, and she leaned over and bumped him with her shoulder.
They were quiet for a while. Erin looked toward the horizon and followed the twisting spine of the river as it coursed through the landscape.
“Your father was kind to me when I first got back,” she said. “I was grateful to know that he was looking out for me.”
Robbie nodded. “He became a nicer person when he stopped drinking. I guess I did, too.”
“You were nice before you started drinking. I’m glad to have you back.”
“Says the person who skipped town for a decade and a half.” He reached out and poked her with his finger. Her ribs were still tender in the area where she’d broken them.
“Right,” she said. “Sorry about that. I was trying to get my head together.”
He tapped twice on the metal girder with the pocketknife. “Well, golly gee, ma’am. You can do that right here in Wolf Point.”
“I noticed,” she said. “Next time, I’d prefer to do it without being lit on fire and attacked with an axe.”
“So you want to do it the easy way.”
“If I can,” she told him, “not that it wasn’t fun the other way.”
“How do they do it in Colorado?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think people usually go to an office and lie down on a couch or something.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Our way’s better.”
She smiled and looked down between her feet at the surface of the water. It was darker than she recalled from the days of her childhood.
“Do you remember what you told me,” she asked, “after you saved my life for the second time?”
“That this was getting old and I was going to have to start charging you for it?”
“No,” she said. “You said that sometimes it felt like they were still with you, Abel and his mother.”
He nodded.
“Does it still feel that way? Do they still haunt you the way they used to?”
He took a moment to think about it. “I can still feel them,” he said. “They’re just quieter than they used to be.”
“I feel them, too,” she told him. “It’ll get better, I hope. I need to get past them. I want to let them go.”
Robbie sighed and put the folded knife back into his pocket. “It takes time, I guess. We’re shaped by the past and the places we come from, but it’s not everything. We get to decide what happens tomorrow and the day after that.” He gave her a nudge, and Erin felt it in her ribs, but only a little. “It’s the way we do things here in Wolf Point,” he said. “We spend the rest of our lives living somewhere in between.”