“Ok, Dad. Bad guys break into your house, start going through your things and acting threatening. So you shoot one. I get it. I totally get defending yourself. But why… why in the world would you leave this mess—this blood on your floor—for it to be the first thing your sixteen-year-old son sees when he steps off the plane into his new home?”

“Well, Junior,” he said, while looking down on me with a stone-cold poker face and taking another long drag on his cigarette, “I figured you might as well know what you’d gotten yourself into… Welcome to the Ponderosa.”