7 p.m.
Chuck glanced away in an attempt to hide his dismay. Why hadn’t Janelle checked with him first?
She leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Chuck looked back at her. “Really.”
So much for the truth, always the truth, between them.
“It was his idea, Chuck. He’s so excited for me. For us. He asked if he could come. Of course I said yes. He’s my brother.”
“And my brother-in-law.”
“And your assistant. Is that what this is about?”
“Was my assistant. The fieldwork’s finished.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“I told you. No problem.” Which was, to a certain extent, the truth.
Chuck had enjoyed working with Clarence Ortega more than any other subcontractor he’d hired over the years. Twenty-four months on the transmission-line project, the longest contract Chuck had ever worked, and Janelle’s brother had been with him the whole time.
Clarence had been a fresh graduate out of the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology who’d been smart enough to follow up the résumé he’d sent Chuck with a personal phone call. At Chuck’s side, as the two worked their way section by section, month after month, along the transmission-line right-of-way across the Navajo Reservation, Clarence had proven himself to be hard-working, eager to learn, and acceptably, if not entirely, reliable.
As had Chuck in his early twenties, Clarence partied too long and too hard on a number of weeknights over the course of the contract. He’d arrive at the worksite an hour or two late on those occasions, uncharacteristically soft-spoken, clearly hung over, and not worth a dime productivity-wise. Clarence hadn’t racked up enough of those unproductive days for Chuck to make an issue of them. Besides, Chuck enjoyed having Clarence around. The young man was friendly and easygoing. He got along well with Chuck and, notably, with young Navajos across the reservation as well.
Clarence mixed easily with the twenty-something Navajos, many chronically unemployed, who filled the rez towns along the transmission-line route, hanging out in fast-food joints and crowding the impromptu flea markets held several days a week in every reservation community. While working for Chuck, Clarence often spent his weekends just across the border from Arizona in the mid-sized city of Gallup, New Mexico. The primary gathering spot on the rez for young tribal members was a few miles southeast of Window Rock, the Arizona town that served as the official capital of the Navajo Nation.
“My Latino people been mixing it up with Indian folks ‘round here for more than four hundred years,” Clarence said with a laugh when Chuck gave him a hard time about his late-night wanderings. “I’m just keeping the tradition alive.”
Archaeological digs on the reservation often fostered accusations of grave robbery and cultural theft, which made Clarence’s off-hours role as an unofficial goodwill ambassador for Bender Archaeological a significant plus. Clarence’s informal public relations work on the reservation was particularly beneficial given the unusually long timeframe of the transmission-line contract. It made good business sense, then, for Chuck to cut Clarence some slack on the rare occasions the young man’s off-the-clock fun limited his on-the-job performance.
Not until this past spring had Chuck accepted Clarence’s long-tendered offer to swing through Albuquerque and meet his parents, Enrique and Yolanda. Janelle stopped by her parents’ small stucco home in Albuquerque’s South Valley the same evening Chuck showed up for dinner, and Chuck’s life had been on fast-forward ever since.
Carmelita and Rosie looked up at Chuck from the picnic table as he stared out across the campground. No way could he convince Janelle to return to Durango tomorrow morning with the girls’ Uncle Clarence set to arrive here tonight. If Chuck announced that Marvin Begay had moved up the deadline for the final transmission-line report, Janelle would suggest, logically enough, that Chuck work on the report in camp on his laptop while she, the girls, and Clarence explored the South Rim on their own.
Chuck took a deep breath. Any way he looked at it, he was trapped at the canyon for at least another day. The best thing he could do, he supposed, was get used to the idea. He exhaled. Everything would be all right. The woman from Albuquerque had chosen not to point him out to Rachel when she’d had the chance. She would leave in the morning to accompany her boyfriend’s body to Flagstaff. After that, Chuck would be in the clear.
He summoned a smile and slipped behind the girls. “Hear that? Your Uncle Clarence is coming!” He tickled each of them in turn. Rosie shrieked in delight, laying her head back against Chuck’s chest. Even Carmelita managed a giggle as she curled her shoulders away from him.
“We gotta eat,” he said to Janelle, waving her over to the table. “Sunset’s in forty-five minutes.”
They left camp at a brisk walk fifteen minutes later and arrived at crowded Grandeur Point just west of the South Rim Visitor Center as the last of the sun’s rays set fire to the farthest walls of the canyon. The topmost ramparts of Shiva Temple, a wedding-cake-layered butte rising a vertical half-mile from the bottom of the canyon, shone like a Roman candle in the last of the day’s sunlight.
Chuck positioned Janelle and the girls against the overlook railing and used Janelle’s phone to snap pictures with Shiva glowing behind them. Rosie jumped from one foot to another. Carmelita held her mother’s hand and displayed a timid smile.
When an elderly man with a heavy German accent offered to take a picture of the four of them together, Chuck handed him the phone and found it easy to slide behind Janelle and the girls at the railing and grin over the tops of their heads. He accepted the phone back from the German man, draped an arm around Janelle’s shoulders, and looked out over the canyon. Around them, dozens of tourists spoke in reverent tones in all sorts of languages as daylight gave way to dusk. The setting sun splashed the cliffs of the North Rim with orange and red, and shadows smoldered deep in the purpling canyon below the pulsating cliffs, the Colorado River a thin dark curl at the bottom of the gorge.
The four of them headed back to the campground after the last of the sun’s rays left the canyon. Chuck tucked his hand around Janelle’s waist as they ambled alongside one another while the girls skipped ahead. This was everything he had imagined married life could be, though he’d always thought of it with friends and acquaintances in mind, not himself. As he’d told Rachel two years ago, ‘til-death-do-you-part never had been part of what he’d pictured for his future, not after his upbringing, if it could be called that, as a lonely only child with a mostly absent mother and entirely absent father. Yet here he was, barely four months after meeting Janelle, and he couldn’t dream of being any happier than he was at this minute.
Yes, there was still the stuff that was eating at him, to use Janelle’s terminology. And there was her time-limit comment earlier today in the museum. But all that was muted this evening. Maybe the death of the guy he’d punched had something to do with it, the finality of the bulging body bag. Chuck was ashamed to think how eager he’d been to confront the guy on Maricopa Point. But he was through with all that now. No more looking for fights. That version of himself didn’t fit with being a committed husband to Janelle and parent to Carmelita and Rosie. He pulled Janelle close as they walked, happy to find that, for the first time since he’d stood beside her and pronounced a shaky “I do” to the Albuquerque City Hall clerk twenty-some days ago, he had no qualms whatsoever about his life’s recent radical change of course.
When they got back to camp, Janelle phoned Clarence while Chuck picked up the hatchet and called the girls over. He made a show of removing the plastic head cover.
“It’s super sharp,” he warned Carmelita as he handed her the hatchet. This time, she took it from him without hesitation. “Now that the cover’s off, this is the real deal.”
She shot him a pointed look, identical to one of Janelle’s. “I’m good,” she replied. “Seriously.”
Janelle watched while talking on the phone with Clarence, her eyes wide with concern, as Chuck fetched firewood from a box beneath the camper and wadded up pages of newspaper. The girls stayed close to him as darkness closed in around them.
Chuck took the hatchet back from Carmelita and demonstrated how to strip thin slices of kindling from one of the chunks of split cedar he’d brought from Durango.
“See?” he said as he leaned the piece of wood against the metal wall of the fire pit and angled a gentle stroke down its side. A reddish-hued sliver peeled from the chunk of wood and the air filled with the pungent aroma of cedar. He flipped the hatchet in his hand and held it out to Carmelita by its handle. “Take it easy. It’s not about blunt force. The idea is to let the sharpness of the blade do the work.”
Carmelita took the hatchet while Rosie, on her toes, looked on.
“Can I do it, too? Can I? Can I?” she begged.
“Awww.”
“For now, Carm will have to take your cuts for you.” He turned to Carmelita. “All set?”
She nodded, dead serious. Chuck steadied the chunk of cedar and stepped back.
“Spread your feet so there’s no chance of hitting your leg if you miss,” he instructed.
She took a couple of practice swings, then let the hatchet fall so gently against the piece of cedar that the blade didn’t even bite into the wood. She shot an embarrassed look at Janelle, who raised her eyebrows in nervous encouragement, still talking to Clarence on the phone.
Carmelita licked her lips and lifted the hatchet for another try. She swung the hatchet downward with a little more force, breaking a small piece of kindling free from the chunk of cedar.
“Yippee!” Rosie cheered.
“Now you’re getting it,” Chuck said.
Carmelita set herself again and took several light chops at the chunk of wood, her confidence growing with each blow. Over the course of a few minutes, she reduced a third of the piece of cedar to a pile of kindling. Chuck showed her how to arrange the kindling pieces and larger chunks of firewood in a pyramid over the wadded-up newspaper in the center of the fire pit. He helped her put a lighter to the base of the pyramid. The flames licked upward, illuminating her face.
“You did it, Carm!” Rosie squealed, dancing around the fire.
Carmelita crouched in front of the flames and held out her hands to the growing warmth. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I did.”
“Way to go,” Janelle praised Carmelita, lowering her phone.
“And she’s still got all ten fingers,” Chuck said.
“You didn’t tell me my daughters would become ax-wielding pyromaniacs if we came here.”
“Daugh-ter,” he corrected, pointing at Carmelita. “She’s a natural.”
Carmelita straightened her back but did not look up from the flames.
“Agreed,” Janelle said. She set her phone on the picnic table. “He’s two hours out. Almost to Flagstaff.”
“Good to hear.” Chuck found himself looking forward to Clarence’s arrival. He’d missed working with him since the completion of the fieldwork portion of the transmission-line contract a month ago. Janelle’s brother had been fun on the job; he’d be just as fun here at the canyon.
Before bedtime, the girls enjoyed their first-ever marshmallow roast, during which Rosie slimed her hair with a long string of melted white sugar. The sliming precipitated a trip with Janelle to the hot-water tap in the sink of the nearest bathroom. Just as Janelle and Rosie returned to camp, Carmelita said that she, too, needed to visit the bathroom.
“You can’t be serious,” Janelle said in response to Carmelita’s ill-timed announcement.
“You don’t need to go with her,” Chuck said, gesturing at the well-lit bathroom building little more than a hundred feet away. “She’s seven. She’s a big girl.” He pointed at the fire. “She proved it.”
Carmelita’s eyes grew large at Chuck’s proposal. “Can I, Mamá?”
Janelle looked from Carmelita to Chuck and back. “I guess,” she said hesitantly. “Straight there, straight back, got it?”
“Got it,” Carmelita said with a solemn nod to her mother. Then she looked at Chuck for reassurance.
“I meant what I said,” he told her. “You’re a big girl. You can handle it.”
She nodded again, this time to herself. Chuck held a flashlight out to her from his seat by the fire. She dusted her hands on the sides of her striped sweat pants and looked out at the darkness. Then she accepted the flashlight and set off. Janelle watched the beam of light bob away up the gravel road.
“Oh, Chuck,” she said, her voice small.
She reached for him from her chair. The fire crackled and popped. A tendril of wood smoke drifted between them. Chuck took Janelle’s hand in both of his. How incredibly brave—or foolhardy—she was. Her life as a single mother in Albuquerque had been fine—decent apartment, steady job as an office receptionist, built-in babysitters in her parents—yet she’d sacrificed it all for a lifelong bachelor who didn’t know a thing about raising kids, or how to be involved in a fully committed adult relationship either, for that matter. Late last month, she’d left her friends, her family, her whole world behind in New Mexico to embark on an entirely new life for herself and the girls in the mountains of southwest Colorado, far from everything and everyone she’d ever known. Now here she was, trusting the well-being of her oldest daughter to a man she’d known only a few months. If Chuck was nervous about his new life with Janelle, then Janelle had every right to be terrified of her new life with him.
“No te preocupes, esposa mia,” Chuck told her. He liked using bits of Spanish with her, just as she did with the girls. In this case, the word esposa didn’t feel as odd coming off his tongue as the word wife had with Donald earlier in the day.
Carmelita returned to camp, her eyes alight at her accomplishment. Janelle hugged her oldest daughter to her before leading both girls off to bed. Carmelita and Rosie were asleep in the camper by the time their uncle drove up half an hour later.
Clarence emerged from his dented hatchback with a bottle of tequila in hand. “Time to celebrate,” he announced, coming around his car. He hitched up his baggy jeans and waved the bottle so the golden liquid glinted in the firelight. “Whew, that’s a long drive.”
“You oughtta be good at it by now,” Chuck said.
Every weekend throughout the transmission-line contract, Clarence had driven at least as far as Gallup, if not all the way home to Albuquerque.
“Four weeks off makes a big difference,” he replied.
Clarence was stocky and broad-chested like his father and Rosie. He shared their throaty tone of voice as well. His large set of white teeth gleamed when he laughed, which was often. His ruddy face and round cheeks reminded Chuck of Santa Claus—if, that is, Santa sported raven-black hair to his shoulders, wore a thick silver stud in each ear, and had a thing for Navajo girls and mezcal tequila.
Janelle rose from her seat beside the fire to hug her brother.
“Lemme at you, Sis,” Clarence said, wrapping her in his arms. Then he reached out to fist-bump Chuck. “Jefe.”
“Something to eat?” Chuck asked.
Over the course of their two years of fieldwork, Chuck and Clarence had spent most weeknights in motel rooms in whatever nondescript reservation town was nearest the section of right-of-way they were working. They’d slept out, Chuck in the enclosed bed of his pickup truck and Clarence in the rear of his hatchback, when the windswept towns that passed for civilization on the rez were a long drive away.
“I grabbed a burger in Gallup,” Clarence said. He gave the nearly full bottle a shake. “This is what I’ve been looking forward to, and you guys have to join me.”
“One shot, that’s all,” said Janelle as she sat back down. “I’m half asleep as it is.”
“It’s a celebration, is what I’m saying. My sister, my boss, happily married. Who’d’ve ever thought?”
He returned to his hatchback and dug around inside until he came up with three shot glasses. He lined them on the roof of the car, filled each in turn, and carried them to the fire.
“The two of you took off for Durango and never gave me a chance to say this,” he told Janelle and Chuck, handing out the shots and raising his glass. “Here’s to both of you. Three weeks in, and may it be three centuries.”
“Centuries?” Janelle fluttered her eyes at Chuck over the top of her glass. “I’m not sure he’d want me three hundred years from now.”
“Yes, I would,” Chuck said. “Three hundred. Three thousand. Three million.”
Her eyes glittered in the firelight. He shivered with pleasure as their glasses clinked. He downed his shot, gasping as the alcohol burned its way to his stomach. He set his glass on the picnic table and tossed another chunk of wood on the fire, sending a shower of sparks into the night air. The three of them settled back in their chairs around the flickering flames.
“How’re things at home?” Janelle asked her brother, as if her daily calls to her mother and father didn’t keep her fully up to date.
Clarence, who lived in an apartment above the garage behind his parents’ house, offered news Janelle probably knew: the latest plan to drive Albuquerque’s drug gangs from the city, a neighbor recently diagnosed with cancer, another who’d won a thousand bucks in the lottery.
It wasn’t long before Chuck’s eyelids began to droop. A glance at Janelle showed she was fading as well. It had been a full couple of days. A full three weeks, for that matter.
“Bedtime,” Chuck said, standing up. “Come on.” He pulled Janelle up beside him.
“’Night,” Janelle said to Clarence as Chuck led her to the camper.
“’Night, Sis,” Clarence replied, remaining by the fire.
Chuck handed Janelle the flashlight and held the screen door open for her. He turned to Clarence. “All set?”
Clarence indicated his hatchback. “Bed’s already made.”
Chuck cradled Janelle in his arms as they fell asleep on the platform opposite the girls in the camper. He slept late the next morning. Like Janelle, he’d had only the one shot of tequila, but the pleasant evening must have had a calming effect on both of them because it was past eight when he slipped outside, leaving Janelle breathing evenly behind him, her head buried in her pillow.
The day was sunny and already warm. He rotated his upper body in a few leisurely stretches, finding that he had little desire to take off on his morning run. Instead, he fired up the camp stove. He finished making coffee just as Janelle joined him at the picnic table in low-cut jeans and a sleeveless top. He poured her a cup while she yawned and kneaded the back of her neck.
“Where’s Carmelita?” she asked sleepily, taking her mug from Chuck.
“Inside.” Chuck poured his own cup and pointed at the camper. “Isn’t she?”
Janelle shook her head.
“I’ve been up a while,” Chuck said with a frown. “Fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Janelle looked around the quiet campsite. She set her mug on the picnic table and ducked inside the camper only to reemerge seconds later. “Rosie’s there, that’s all,” she said, her voice strained.
She circled the camper, checking the windows of her mini-SUV and Clarence’s hatchback and looking all directions. Chuck followed, coffee cup in hand. She set off toward the nearest bathroom, the one Carmelita had visited on her own the night before. Chuck set his mug on the table and jogged to catch up.
Janelle turned to him. “No. You stay here.”
She walked a few more paces, then broke into a run.
Back at camp, Chuck peered into Clarence’s car. Clarence lay diagonally across the folded rear hatch area in his sleeping bag, his eyes closed, the bottle of tequila, half-empty, tucked beside him. Chuck double-checked Janelle’s car next, convinced she’d overlooked Carmelita curled up inside reading a book. But both the front and rear seats were empty. He turned a full circle. Where was she?
The campground was full of noise and motion, campers cooking, washing dishes, collapsing tents, and walking to and from the bathrooms, unaware of the frigid rush of fear now coursing through Chuck’s veins.
Janelle emerged alone from the women’s bathroom. She took a couple of steps in the direction of camp, then turned and disappeared inside the men’s half of the building. She came out seconds later, still alone, and ran toward camp.
“Carm!” she called. “Carmelita!” she yelled again, drawing stares from neighboring campers.
Chuck met her at the edge of the campsite. “She’s gone, Chuck,” Janelle said, her voice shaking, her eyes filled with alarm. “Carm’s gone.”