Then Again

by M. James Thalman

Just before supper on the coldest February eleventh ever in Sevier County, Utah, farmer Evan Oakerlund, age fifty, goes out to look for the family dog and doesn't come back. An hour later, Evan's wife, Nona, finds his body not fifty yards from their back porch. Three hours after that, the news of Evan's sudden death reaches his son Robbie, who is six thousand miles away in Austria and just four days from completing a two-year Mormon mission. Then Again is the story of Robbie's trip home. He hastily leaves the glaciered majesties of the Central Alps for the lava-domed hayfields where he grew up. He is warmly welcomed back to his tiny home town by his grieving loved ones, but they have become not quite his family. Vermillion is a place like home, but not home, and he finds that his youth is a past that is there to stay.