He didn't answer that.
"Can I tell you something he won't?" she said. "And you have to promise not to throw it at him the way you threw that picture."
"I didn't throw it."
"You laid it down like a royal flush, Carter. Promise."
"I promise."
She looked at the mesquite.
"In 1977 the President pardoned all of them," she said. "The ones who went to Canada. It was the first thing he did, practically. January. Your father heard it on the CBC in the shop and he put down a radio he was working on and walked outside without his coat. In Vancouver. In January." She smiled a little. "He came home and he said, Pardoned by a man named Carter. Isn't that something. And then he laughed so hard I thought he'd hurt himself, and then he stopped laughing, and he didn't say anything for the rest of the night."
"Is that why we moved here?"
"That's why we moved here. He could have gone anywhere in the States. He picked Tucson. You know how far Tucson is from Bisbee?"
"Like a hundred miles."
"Ninety-six. He clocked it." She was quiet. "He said it was for the jobs, and the weather, and my arthritis, which I don't have. But it was ninety-six miles. He wanted to be close enough to drive it."
"Did he?"
His mother didn't answer right away. The swamp cooler kicked on behind them with a shudder.
"Once," she said. "In the spring of 1979. You were four. He took the truck one Saturday and said he had a house call in Sierra Vista. He came back that night and he didn't talk for two days. Not to me. Not to you. He sat out there at that bench with the light on and didn't fix anything." She turned the bobby pin. "Finally I asked him. And he said he'd parked across the street from the studio. For an hour. And he'd seen his father through the window. Walt was older, he said. He was standing at the counter in the front with his glasses down his nose reading something. And your father sat in the truck and watched him read for an hour, and then he started the engine and drove home."
"Why?"