By the time the sun had risen high, Samantha Roche didn’t feel good.
Along the way, she had tried not to touch anything that didn’t belong to her. But after all those hours, her stomach felt like it might turn in on itself. She gave in to her empty belly and grabbed the first food she could find in the latched cabinet—a jumbo bag of Oreos. She’d planned to put most of them back. She was only going to eat a few. Only they tasted so good. She couldn’t help pushing whole cookies into her mouth and, before she knew it, the entire package of them had disappeared.
They had to be in the mountains now, driving on meandering roads. Every time the trailer took a corner, the green-sprigged curtains flailed sideways toward the opposite side. The stainless-steel measuring cups that hung over the sink on intricate hooks swung out and clapped back against the wall like little hollow bells. The camper pitched first one direction around a curve, then the opposite direction around another.
Sam wasn’t supposed to be eating sugar stuff. And, after all this, she just felt so tired. She couldn’t be sure whether the roiling in her stomach was from the winding roads or the entire package of cream-filled Oreos or from the choking fear that had lodged itself in her throat.
Now that she’d gotten this close to Wyoming, she couldn’t help thinking about things she hadn’t considered before.
What if her father had changed his mind? What if he didn’t want to see her? What if he didn’t care anymore about what happened to her? Or what if he met her and he was disappointed?
Inside the rolling trailer, Sam closed her eyes. She had no idea how many more hours it would take them to get to where they were going. Her belly hurt, just thinking about it.
She burrowed down in the pillows on the bunk again, anticipation keeping her awake. The letter, which she’d kept safely in the folds of her sweatshirt next to her heart, had now been tucked away inside her Camp Plentycoos backpack for safekeeping.
She kept herself satisfied with this thought: even if her father didn’t like what he saw in her, she could have his words written on that page.
That much, at least, would belong to her.
“David?”
“Hello, Susan.”
“Did you get the posters?”
“I did. I’ve already been to the Delta counter to pick them up.”
“Did you sleep last night?”
“No, I didn’t. Did you?”
“No.”
David just kept talking about nothing because it was the only thing he knew to do. “I haven’t heard anything. Not one word.” A stutter-step of seconds, while he waited for her to echo his statement, which she didn’t do. “Why so quiet, Susan? Have you?”
A long unbroken hesitation, which sent his hopes plummeting to his knees. Then, “Yes, David. I’ve heard something. But it’s nothing good.”
He came out of his chair, gripping the telephone receiver against his ear as if he was trying to insert it into his head. “What? Susan? Oh, Susan, is she all right?”
“I don’t know about that part, David. We still haven’t heard anything about that.”
“But you said—”
“It’s this, David.” Susan’s voice over the line trembled with irony and fear. “The tests. The doctor called a minute ago. Isn’t that something? It’s a national holiday, but he knew I’d want to know.”
“The tests? Tests?” For one helpless moment, he struggled to remember what the tests might be, just as he’d struggled once to place Susan’s name. The tests. Braden’s test, for Samantha.
“They came back late yesterday afternoon. He didn’t realize he had them until today. It’s over, I think. Braden doesn’t match. He’s farther off than you.”
Words failed him. There was nothing that could be said, only the deep sense of loss that crashed over David like a breaking wave. “Oh, Susan.”
“So that’s it,” she said. “Just like that, David. There isn’t anything you can do to help her.”
Every year, the July Fourth celebration in Jackson Hole kicked off with a pancake breakfast in the square. Members of the Jackson Hole Jaycees donned red chef’s aprons donated by the Silver Dollar Grille and stood in line behind a sizzling outdoor griddle that must have been a good fifteen yards long. They artfully flipped flapjacks, hash browns, bacon and sausage, and massive slabs of scrambled eggs that looked like they’d been run over by a John Deere tractor. By nine in the morning, striped awnings had been erected on the grass, the Bar J Wranglers were tuning up their fiddles on the flatbed trailer parked in front of The Gap, and the Teton Twirlers Square Dance Club was making their first official grand-right-and-left of the day.
It was a day for commemorating and honoring freedom in the United States of America, with what seemed like an entire nation of tourists who had come together to see one of its greatest treasures. It was a day for hanging red-white-and-blue bunting from the balcony of the Rancher Billiard Hall and Sirk Shirts, and waving flags from the doorways of the little shops lining Broadway and Millward Street. It was a day for children to roam in herds, devouring homemade scones while honey butter dripped from their chins, and snicker at the square dancers’ goofy clothes while secretly wishing they could join in.
Because of his upstanding community rank as an officer of the bank, David Treasure had been invited to sit in the reviewing stand that day and judge the floats during the annual July Fourth parade. He fiddled with the knot of his patriotic tie just as he heard Abby passing in the hallway behind him, as lightly and as carefully as a shadow.
“I can’t do this, Abby,” he said, his voice sounding gruff and hard, resounding with a huge echo in a house that more often now remained futile with silence.
David felt, rather than heard, her pause behind him.
“Can’t what?” she asked. “Can’t tie your tie? Or can’t go judge a parade with everything going on in your head?”
“Can’t—” As he said it, the knot of his tie tightened pitiably somewhere below his shirt’s third button. David gave up and stared at the dilapidated thing in the mirror. “Either of them, Abby. I can’t do any of these things anymore. It’s all so hopeless.”
He saw Abby’s face appear behind his left shoulder in the mirror. She stared at his tie without raising her eyes. This woman, whom I’ve married and who trusted me. Even the things I’ve tried to do right, I’ve done wrong.
“Turn around,” she said. “Turn around and let me work on you.”
He balked at first, his mind on his daughter and all he’d been unable to do.
All You asked of me, Lord, and it came to nothing.
He turned his body toward his wife so she could fix his tie.
Abby didn’t raise her face the entire time she struggled with his neckwear. He could only see the top of her head the way a bird would see it, the crooked part she’d combed into her hair, the double cowlick she’d gotten from her grandfather and was always trying to style away.
His skin went prickly with the nearness of her. He ought not to swallow. Thinking about not doing it made him need to do it so badly, he had to give in.
His Adam’s apple bobbed. He could tell by the way her hands hesitated against the hollow of his throat, even through the starched cotton of his shirt, that she knew why.
“Abby—” he began.
“Don’t, David,” she said. “Don’t do this to me. Not now. Not with all these people who are needing us.”
“Abby.”
“You have hurt me. That isn’t going to go away.”
“Look at me.”
“I’ve made a choice for now, David. I’ve made the choice to grit my teeth and get by. And that’s all I’m going to do. I can’t do it any other way.”
“I need you right now, can’t you see that? My life is in turmoil and I don’t have a wife beside me. I can’t take it day in and day out, you coming close to me and reminding me what I did. You even prayed for Susan, then you looked at me and accused.”
While he held himself as unyielding as a timber post, she manhandled his necktie as if she were tying an outfitters’ knot on the rump of a horse. She lashed it through itself with fierce intention and tightened it with little nervous jerks of her hand. In one gliding motion, she slid the knot, a perfectly formed triangle, into the notch of his collar at the base of his throat. She took three steps back from him. David inspected the results in the mirror. His tie looked so right the way she’d done it, they could have used it on the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine.
“Lay blame where blame is due, David.”
“Just stop,” he said. “Don’t say it.”
“You should have thought about needing a wife beside you on the day you started your affair.”
For the past three days, the women residents and workers at the Community Safety Network had been baking together in the kitchen to make goodies to sell to the parade crowds in the Jackson Hole town square. Sophie Henderson had made her famous zucchini buttermilk bread along with several batches of ginger snaps and chocolate-chip brownies. Kate Carparelli had baked her long-standing family-favorite rhubarb pie, as well as sticky buns and four-dozen lemon chess tarts. Thanks to several of the other shelter residents, individually wrapped gingerbread men, apple muffins, and slabs of peanut brittle stood in enticing rows on the table.
Sophie waved as she saw Abby weaving her way through the crowd. “Over here! We need you. We’ve made almost two hundred dollars so far.”
“Great.” Abby waved back. Here she came, with three plastic boxes from the bakery at Albertson’s—chocolate cupcakes with industrial icing, pastel sprinkles adorning the machine-made, swirled tops. She set them down with an elaborate sigh. “And look at these. After everybody cooking all week, I didn’t have time to bake.”
Sophie wrapped an arm around her. “I’ll bet those go faster than anything else on the table. Kids will always pay more money for things with sprinkles.”
Abby hugged her back. “Go ahead, Soph. Make me feel better.”
Kate had been watching them, her eyes somber, from across the booth. “Has anybody heard anything about David’s girl, Abby? Have they found her?”
“No. Nothing new.”
Hungry customers inundated them before they could finish the conversation. Quarters and nickels began to pile high in the cash box. Although Sophie had been a little off with her prediction about the Albertson’s cupcakes with sprinkles, several children did select them. Kate’s rhubarb pie brought a record seventeen dollars.
Just as a lull came, a man with dark hair slicked back, runnels still left from the comb, strode toward the table. He smelled of hair crème. A burgundy Cattle Kate scarf was knotted like an ascot beneath his clean-shaven jaw, setting off blue eyes that were the same color as a mountain summer sky. The man clamped Sophie’s zucchini buttermilk bread in one huge paw. He fished a huge wad of bills and a snuffbox from his back pocket. “Here you go.” He handed the bills to Kate.
Kate unfolded them and began to count. “Five… ten… fifteen…” She tried to return the rest. “You’ve given me thirty-five. This bread’s only fifteen.”
“I see the price.” He poked his snuffbox back where it belonged. “But I say it’s worth thirty-five.”
At the sound of that voice, Sophie lifted her gaze from the tin box where she’d been counting out pennies for a little boy. Her body went rigid, her face drawn and looking almost ill. Abby saw the box-lid slam on her fingers. Sophie didn’t even jump.
He said, “Hey, Snooks.”
At the sight of him, Sophie shrank a little. She lashed her arms across her chest and took a step backwards. “Mike? What are you doing here?”
He touched the Saran-wrapped loaf to his belt buckle and Sophie physically flinched. Abby thought, I wonder if he hits her with that. “Oh, Sophie Darlin’. You know how it is,” he said sweetly while Sophie kept staring at his huge hands as if she could see them knocking her around. “It’s time to put this behind you and come home.”
“This isn’t going to work.”
“Let’s talk.” He reached toward her and touched an arm that had been black and blue when Sophie had first arrived. “One more time. That’s all. Just one more time.”
Abby had seen this scene so many times, she almost knew what the next words were going to be. It always played out sugar sweet; then, when the men didn’t get what they wanted, they turned angry. Tell him, Sophie. Tell him. Tell him. You aren’t coming home again.
“Didn’t you like my roses?”
No, Abby wanted to say. She gave those away.
“That’s not going to work. Flowers don’t make up for what you do. Mike—” Sophie floundered. The table and all those cupcakes stood in between them and, for the moment, Abby couldn’t tell whether Sophie wanted to run toward this man, or away. A heart and a spirit in her, at war with each other, playing out on her face. “Abby?”
Abby nodded. “I’m here.”
Sophie turned to her husband again. “This isn’t fair, you cornering me like this.”
“Why not? You’re out here for all the rest of the world to see. Why can’t I see you?”
“You could have made that bread yourself from your mother’s notecard in the recipe box. You didn’t need me to do it.”
He was standing in everybody’s way. Children elbowed in past him, and he stepped around several of them, pushing them out of his path. It was clear Sophie’s fear hadn’t gone away. Kate and Abby exchanged quarters for peanut brittle, making an obvious barrier between the man with the bread and this small, terrified woman in the booth.
Mike opened the wrap on his wife’s bread, tore off a hunk, and shoved it into his mouth. “Humph,” he said around the crust. “Good. Real good.”
Abby said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“This is a public park.”
“Yes, but your wife doesn’t want to see you.”
“Wait.” He grinned suddenly. “Wait, Sophie. I got something.” He set the bread on the table. “I got something you’ll like.” Without any further ado, he trotted away.
The air of fun and gaiety had left the booth the moment Mike Henderson arrived. Now Sophie, Abby, and Kate sold treats with quiet care, keeping watch over a hundred heads in the crowd.
“I wish he wouldn’t come back,” Kate said, “but I know he will. I’ve seen this happen about a hundred times before.”
“Of course he’ll come back,” Sophie said in a pinched voice. “That’s all he ever thinks about these days. Come back. Come back. Come back. And I just wish…I just wish…”
Abby touched her arm. “If you want the police, I’ve got my cell phone in my purse.”
“No, don’t do that to him. I don’t want anything to happen to him. Please.”
Here he came, lugging a heavy wooden crate with wheatgrass sticking out of the corners, his hands jammed through two holes for handles. Every few yards or so across the grass, someone would stop him and peer at the box with a stupefied expression, a glance of inquiry, and a careful hand reached inside. He approached the Community Safety Network booth with long, easy strides, and plopped the box on the ground with obvious pride. Sophie stood on tiptoe to look over.
“Uh-uh-uh.” He stooped and reached inside where she couldn’t see. “You let me be the one to present you with this little fellow. Hold out your arms.”
“No. I’m not taking any live thing. You just want me to come home and take care of it.”
“Well, I figure since the roses didn’t do any good—” When he stood up, he’d lashed his arms around a big ring-necked pheasant. It craned its neck and flapped its wings in Mike Henderson’s big hands, the most beautiful wild bird Abby had ever seen. Its tawny plumage glinted chestnut and purple and green, a corona of colors, in the daylight. Its eyes were round with surprise and wet with shine.
“How about this for a present? We were out with Ramey’s Retriever, just giving it a run. Dog flushed this thing and we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”
“Mike, that’s a pheasant. A wild bird. Something people hunt.”
Mike Henderson moved on impulse and not on logic. “Not until the fall, people don’t hunt it. Serves all those hunters right who go out mid-week, when I can’t afford to hunt until Saturday. Now I’ve got my own private stock.”
“Mike, you’re not thinking. You don’t get it. I need a pheasant like I need a hole in the head.”
The pheasant let out one double-noted crow, kur-rik.
“Looks like this one got his tail bobbed off. Looks like a coyote taught him a lesson. Bet he won’t get in the way of a coyote again.”
Abby moved in closer behind Sophie and pulled her cell phone out of her purse like a weapon. “Sophie has come to us for protection from you. If you don’t leave her alone, I’m going to make a domestic disturbance call to the police.”
“Mike,” Sophie said. “I don’t want that bird.”
“I’m trying to make you listen, Sophie. I’m trying to make you see how much I love you.”
“There’s love that wins battles and there’s love that loses them. I’m trying to figure out which one we’ve got.”
“I said I wouldn’t do it again, if you’d come home. I said I’d go see somebody.”
“You keep getting it gnarled up like that. You can’t make me do something that hinges on you. You can only figure out what two people’s love is together when you know what two people’s love is, separate.”
“Sophie, you just need to get back home.”
The crowd began to push in. “I want to pet that thing, mister. That’s the weirdest bird I’ve ever seen.” “Can I see it?” “Let me!”
The pheasant, which wasn’t built much for flying anyway, flapped again, hard. With an airy whoosh against Mike’s chest, it burst out of his arms and landed, wings threshing, on the bake-sale table. Dollar bills flew. Chocolate cupcakes with pastel sprinkles scattered in the grass. The bird’s feet made tiny chocolate W’s, evenly spaced, where it dashed for escape across the tablecloth. It took off tottering across the grass, its bare behind tucked under and waddling, its scarlet wattle seesawing back and forth with every step.
Every child in the town square sprinted in hot pursuit. In the corner of the square, the Teton Twirlers had broken into a fast rendition of “Oh Johnny, Oh!” One fellow, in the midst of a swing with his partner, had to wrench his cowboy boot sideways to keep from stepping on the pheasant and three kids. The pheasant took another flight and Mike jumped in to catch it. It fluttered up and forward like a hovercraft, escaping straight into the peril of a woman’s square-dance costume, snagging itself in her bandana-and-tulle gathered skirt. There it floundered and no one dared disentangle it while it struggled to find the solid ground or sky, either one.
“Get it out! Get it out!” The woman stamped her Mary Jane shoes, desperately fearful, while an alien living thing rousted among her petticoats. As she tried to flatten it out of her skirt with her hands, the Bar J Wranglers on the flat-bed trailer broke into a rousing fiddle rendition of “Birds of a Feather.”
“Hey, Henderson,” somebody bellowed from the crowd. “Is that your new dancing partner?”
The pheasant scurried down the street, rounded a corner into an alleyway, and was gone.
In frustration, Mike slapped his big hand against his hipbone. When he wheeled back to face everybody, a vein protruded like a scar from his forehead. “Nobody makes a fool out of me.”
“Mike—”
“You made a fool out of me, Sophie. Right when I was trying to do something good.”
Abby wrapped her arm around Sophie’s shoulders and tried to draw her away. “You don’t have to do it,” she said. “Sophie, you don’t have to let him pull you like this.”
“This is not what I wanted, Mike,” Sophie said, her arms fastened against her chest again while Abby stood beside her. “No matter what parts of that bird are missing, it still needs to be set free.”
“But that bird is a gift,” he insisted.
“You can’t give something as a gift if people don’t want it,” she said. “I want you to leave me alone, Mike. I want you to just go away.”