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bring out the food, and everyone would sit politely and wait. We sat down as a family. Bob stood up and said grace.
    I was just shy of my thirteenth birthday when I got there, and it was obvious to me that I was the youngest. I felt really small. Some of the kids were already seventeen or eighteen, and they were massive. They seemed like grown men. They drove cars and had jobs in town. I felt really little, and I was intimidated by them. But I felt really protected by Bob, and I fell in love with the whole scene. Bob was our mom and dad. Bob’s attitude was “We believe in working hard and doing sports and kicking ass and having fun!” It seemed like fun, and it seemed like a challenge. I really wanted to fit in and do it right.
    But it was strict. There were lots of rules. Bob ran the place like a business because it
was
his business. He had some tough kids sent to him, and he was determined to do right by them. He was a strict Catholic and had very strong ideas about right and wrong. The difference from everything I’d grown up with so far was that he was fair, and his ideas were actually
about
right and wrong. Before that, the rules in my life had just been the rules. We do this because Jehovah’s Witnesses do this, or because Christian Scientists do this. The church says so, or Joe says so. Now Bob was offering another voice, but one without the guilt or anger or force. Or shame. His word was final, but it didn’t feel severe. He talked the talk, but he walked the walk, too. He never cursed. He never got drunk. He never got angry. He just told you how it was, and that’s how it was.
    You’d see him every day at breakfast. You had to be up on time and dressed and presentable. If you weren’t up, or if you were late to breakfast, someone would come shake you. If it happened twice, Bob would come to your bed with a pitcher of ice water and dump it on you.
    Most of the boys went to school in Susanville. I started in there right away, too. Every morning we’d get into a white van with one of our counselors behind the wheel, and we’d all ride to school and go to our classes. In the afternoon we’d get in the van again and come back to the ranch, where we’d hang out and play sports. On the weekend, Bob would arrange big games of football and baseball with the boys and local teams. Physical fitness was very big with him. He thought that was how you took wild city kids and calmed them down—by putting them out in the country, taking them away from whatever was making them crazy, and giving them a safe place to spend all that energy. You played sports, or you worked, or you did both. And you did your chores.
    Bob was a huge force in the community. He was involved with the church and with the town. He’d drive down the street in his Cadillac, which was always shiny and perfect, and wave at everybody. He was a snappy dresser, and he was always smiling and friendly like he was the mayor. He went to the same restaurant for breakfast every day, and would eat the same meal: eggs Benedict, wheat toast, and coffee, black (at which point he would announce, “hot and black, like my women”). He was very social and would hold court over those three cups, volunteering his boys for whatever the town needed.
    At the house, things were very orderly. There were rules and there were consequences. If you were supposed to be somewhere at seven o’clock, it
had
to be seven o’clock. If you screwed up, you got work duty. You had to clean something or fix something. Bob had a road crew, and the kids who had screwed up had to go into town and clean up a park or pick up trash by the side of the highway.
    If a kid had done something worse than just being late, Bob would bring out the belt. He’d say, “Come here, kid,” and you knew what was coming. But he wasn’t angry, even then. He was the king of cool. You could cry, you could scream and yell, you could