Wyoming Is a Real Place

WE ARE not supposed to tell our mother that sometimes Dad tries on his girlfriend’s underwear. He says she would stop letting us come visit him in Wyoming if we told, and we like Wyoming. The sky is huge and we need jackets even in the summertime, and we don’t have to get haircuts. He tries on her underwear and also her dresses sometimes because it’s comfortable. He says wearing a dress is like being inside a cloud.

We are all at a hootenanny in a town called Moose. It’s us and Dad and Dad’s girlfriend with their baby strapped to her. A hootenanny is where a lot of people play music. We have been to one before. Some light blue is poking up out of Dad’s jeans like you get sometimes with the girls in school, and he was wrong about there not being any food here.

Dad is talking into his tape recorder, so that he won’t forget the ideas he has for the book he’s going to write someday. Every idea he has is set in a wrecked version of the future. He says that’s where the money is.

“In the future, a boy