“I’m just not happy,” Thomas said. “It’s been months since I felt happy. Maybe longer.” His voice sounded far away, as if he was driving somewhere.

It was looking like a mistake to talk to Thomas so regularly when he needed his “time alone.” I had no idea what else to do, though. I felt helpless, as if I were holding someone else’s crying baby in my arms, wishing his mother would hurry back. I watched the landscape out the window of my room; a gust of wind blew through and the desert willow shook in protest. Purple blossoms fluttered past, as if fleeing that old cranky tree at last.

“Should I come home?” In Taj Mahal, I walked around the bed and back again, a metaphorically fitting path. Maybe staying at the ranch was foolish. Only a few days had passed, but perhaps this was the time that a wife was supposed to rush in with marriage-saving gestures—sheet-tearing nights of lust, proclamations of love and loyalty, sickbed attention of grilled cheese sandwiches and soup and shoulder rubs.

I felt an odd lack of alarm. Then again, I had always preferred dread to panic. It was quieter. It had an element of the slow burn that panic lacked, the benefits of stalling and denial. Panic got in there with its fists up. Dread painfully dragged its feet, but at least it bought you time.

“No, don’t. Your aunt needs you. It’s great. I’m taking it easy. Eating what I want. Doing some self-care.”

I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. Did he actually use those words? “Self-care?” I repeated.

Who was this man? Had I been married to a stranger all these years? None of this was like him at all. Thomas was a happy person. He sometimes even whistled. Who whistled? Small things pleased him—a package of powdered-sugar donuts, lumber from the hardware store, a call from Melissa. He deserved my kindness; he was honestly struggling, and I respected the integrity in that, but the man I knew hated a cliché. Self-care? Really? Would he be taking lavender-scented baths next, with those plastic blow-up pillows? Dear God, would he start lighting candles?

“Thanks, Cal. I appreciate your sarcasm.”

“I’m sorry, but where’s my husband? Can we be real here? What do you want, Thomas?”

“I want to know what I want! I feel…empty.”

I hadn’t had a cup of coffee yet. Tex sat by my bed and stared at me, as if he, too, felt empty and might be full again if I could only read those small, pleading eyes. Down the hall, Shaye was talking to Nash as if Nash had gone deaf. I wished I could lay my head on a pillow scented with lavender oil and rest.

“Your mother died! It’s only been six months.”

“Stop saying that. It’s not just her dying.”

But grief, I suspected, was a dangerous creature. A person had no idea how menacing it was. It lurked behind rocks, leaping out to take you down the moment you thought it was safe to come out. It was our evil nemesis our whole life long, the enemy we dreaded and avoided and stood right up against as it blew its withering breath on us. It was wily, too. It could make sneak attacks during innocent tasks like cleaning a closet or turning pages in an address book. Small losses could fell you as sure as large ones; they could gang up, thugs on a dark, empty street, taking your valuables and beating you senseless.

“It’s like we’re buddies,” he said. “A couple of roommates.”

“Is this about sex?”

“It’s about passion. It’s about giving up some idea…”

“Everyone feels this way,” I said. “And do you know why? It’s not a fair story to put on two real people.”

Thomas didn’t reply. There was only the hollow-chamber whooshing of him in a moving car.

“Do you want to leave me?” I asked.

Silence. And then a long exhale. “I found myself looking at a woman at work,” he said.

My stomach sank. I thought, Here we go. “People look, Thomas.”

“I don’t look. I’ve never looked.”

“Who was it?”

“Doesn’t even matter. Someone I can’t even stand. It’s the idea.”

“I want to know.”

“You don’t.” I didn’t, not really.

“I do! Who?”

“Fine. Remember that Laura?”

“The one with the—”

“Right.”

“Tall? Brown hair? Kind of…”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“I know who you mean.”

“She’s annoying as hell, to be honest. But, still.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

Well, that wasn’t true; it did, and I knew it.

My mother-in-law, June, once told me that marriage takes work. She said it as if she’d thought up this concept herself. She was one of those people who always said obvious, long-accepted truths in a way that implied she was the expert, teaching and enlightening. A person needed to be careful using credit cards. Video games could cause children to be violent. Too much salt could lead to high blood pressure. Who knew.

She cornered me in her kitchen the Thanksgiving before Thomas and I got married. He had sold his Volkswagen Beetle to buy me a ring, and it sparkled on my left hand. I was so proud of it. I actually tried to catch it in beams of sunlight, because I loved the rainbow reflections it made. That ring somehow evened things out with the tight-mouthed woman who was Thomas’s mother and me, I thought, but I was wrong.

The house smelled like turkey cooking: sage and thyme and something buttery. June had grabbed my wrist and looked at me sternly as if I’d already made dire mistakes. And I had, in her eyes. Deciding to keep my surname was a rejection of her and her husband, the deceased Mr. William Bennett. You know, Callie, she said, marriage takes work. With her eyes fixed on mine and her voice as thin and cunning as the silk of a spider, it sounded mean and dark and doomed. It sounded like a prognosis of failure, a pronouncement of her lack of faith in my ability to come through. Instead of Sunday mornings together, and our own children, and a lifetime of each other’s birthday cakes, she made Thomas’s and my future sound like black lung and canned beans, the Sisyphean hauling of boulders and cold cellars lit by a single lightbulb.

But what kind of work should one do, exactly, when a partner is not happy? Or when a partner feels a lack of passion or finds himself looking at a woman at work? Does one try to juggle clowns to make him smile? Ride a unicycle in a negligee? Send him off on a tropical vacation involving fruity drinks and girls in small bikinis? Apply the assumed cure-all couples counseling, even if half of the couple refuses to go? Work implies the application of specific tasks and efforts to get particular results. The problem is, what tasks? Which efforts? This kind of work had no job description or employee manual. You couldn’t fix life. You could come to accept it; you could modify it and shine it up a bit, but you couldn’t change what it was.

I suspected something then, as I held that phone with the silent man on the other end: When it came to us mysterious, complicated, and wayward human beings and our even more mysterious, complicated, and wayward hearts, work was a comforting illusion. It was better than nothing, but sometimes it was a downright lie. It was a life preserver with a tear, or a road sign spun the wrong direction by mean boys. Even if two people were working cheerfully beside each other, sharing the same goal, picking up litter on the freeway of life, keeping it beautiful, there was no telling when one might decide to hop into the back of a stranger’s pickup. As much as we might wish otherwise, a person had his own thoughts on the matters of life and love and acted of his own accord. Thomas would, Nash would, and so would I. Think of the time and energy we’d save if we got this through our thick heads: All of the work and cajoling and manipulating and being good and being kind and being hideous that every one of us partakes in in order to control someone else—well, it is no match for the simple will all humans were given on the day sperm met egg. Will was our surest road to ruin, and to glory.

—

I wasn’t sure if I still knew the way to the lake. I hoped so, otherwise I could get lost out there, and it would be embarrassing when they had to search for me with small planes and infrared lights. I’d have to apply the knowledge I gained when Melissa was (too briefly, it now turned out) in the Girl Scouts. She never liked that uniform, and, brave girl—a girl much bolder and braver than I ever was—she refused to wear it.

I passed the cabins. Old Avalon and Shangri-La and the Ritz and another that no longer had a sign hanging above the door—they had held up well over the years, but they were eerie in their vacancy. When you looked at the spiderwebs everywhere and the windows crusted with dirt, you felt the ghosts of people who must be dead by now. Any kind of animal might have made a home inside there. Bats, even, with their vampire faces and webbed, leathery wings; prehistoric mammals from your worst nightmares.

Across from the cabins was a creepy outhouse—it had a shower stall and a metal sink. I remembered us running in for a quick pee when we were kids, hurrying out as fast as we could, sure we were going to be murdered by a maniac hiding under that rusty showerhead. I remembered Amy and Melissa, too, years later, holding hands and squealing whenever they dashed by.

Past the outhouse, down the gravel path—which I could barely see beneath the weeds—was another cabin, a larger one, made of logs, with a porch and a tilting chimney. The dude wrangler used to live out there, if I had that right. A woodpile leaned against one wall. I wouldn’t reach for a stick of that wood without a medic nearby—it had been there so long, the spiders would have evolved to fist-sized brutes. A metal pail sat on the porch, and a frayed rope hung on a rusted hook. A cabin like that, land like this: It would seem like some kind of Western cliché to us Seattleites, who lived amid vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, yet here it was.

The path wound through open acres, headed up. Hugo would have loved that walk. A thicket of eucalyptus snagged my memory, and I went that way. I’d told Nash I was taking a nature hike, and she’d looked at me the same way people supposedly looked at the first joggers of the 1970s. In Seattle, if you didn’t hike or bike at least once a month, they took away your citizenship and made you live in the suburbs, where people actually used their cars. But here, there were no nature hikes. There was just nature, the plain-faced fact of it. You walked in it to get places.

I felt a little out of breath from altitude, or from my sorry physical condition. My imagination got carried away with me as I tromped across the yellow grass and the rocks of that hill. I tried not to think about snakes and lizards and poisonous things, and so of course I thought about snakes and lizards and poisonous things. I swatted my ankles at every innocent brush of a tall weed. It was one of the reasons you wore boots out here and not the silly sandals I had chosen.

I hiked on. I remembered the rise that came just before you saw Washoe Lake spread out below. But obviously I didn’t remember it very well, or maybe that kind of majesty is required to fade and then hit you anew every time, because, when I reached the ridge, the vista shocked me. “Wow,” I said out loud, to no one or to the One who might be out there. It felt like something offered, something that required an expression of appreciation, at least—the enormous, rugged expanse carved by ice flows and rivers, the valley of yellow with splays of purple flowers, the deep blue-green of Washoe Lake, and, beyond that, miles and miles and miles of land and land and land. I was a silly, insignificant human with my squabbles with Thomas, with my menial, mortal issues. This vista was reason enough to spend your life out here, as Nash had. Even alone, and with more to handle than was good for you, if you could just stand on that ridge every now and then and witness how large the sky was, it would be worth it.

I breathed it all in. There, I could understand how people used the word Maker, a word that sounded preposterous in everyday life. People in Seattle would smirk with superiority at a word like that, but it made sense then. I saw the hand of the One True Great Artist, and let the capital letters fly; I don’t care. That’s how I felt.

And from there, too, I could see where the semitrucks had gathered. I could see a tiny huddle of men and a tiny pile of something metal. I saw a row of trailers.

I moved on, traveled toward them. From the ridge, the collection of equipment and crew had looked like the slightest muddle on the landscape, but when I arrived, I saw how wrong that first impression was. There was a dusty energy around me, a sense of something large happening. There were hay bales and men unloading things and dropping them with loud clatters, and there was the slam of doors and orders called out and the smell of heat and bodies and horseshit.

I saw him before he saw me. I recognized that tan suede hat, and the shoulders in that heather-blue T-shirt, and something about the way the muscles in his back moved as he rode his horse. The horse was shiny, shiny black with white socks, and it had thick, meaty muscles in its hindquarters. Kit’s thighs gripped the horse as he rode down the sections of metal fence going up.

He waved. I felt immediately self-conscious. I had no business being there. A woman in stiff jeans stepped around me as if I was in her way. Seven or eight people were in sight—on horseback, on foot, men in plaid shirts wearing sunglasses under cowboy hats. God, it was hot out there, and I was wearing those sandals, and my own T-shirt seemed too bright and wrongly cheery.

Kit Covey rode my way on his horse, and I didn’t know a thing about either of them, and they both terrified me. Even the sound of those hooves clopping on the ground was foreign. This had all seemed like a better idea back at the ranch, just after I had that jolt of caffeine. The why not of it was fading fast. You had to be careful with coffee. A few sips, and you could feel like the world was yours.

“You came!” Kit said. “You walked?”

“It’s not that far,” I said.

“Far enough, in this heat. Come on.” He swung off that horse and was on the ground next to me. It was something out of the movies—he was. He was another cliché that wasn’t a cliché at all here. In Seattle, we had tech guys and hipster baristas with nose rings, and we thought that life like that—the one going on right here right now, with men in cowboy hats, men with silver belt buckles, men with horses and guns—had been gone for years. But Kit Covey—his face and neck were shiny with sweat, and, dear God, if I didn’t imagine him in bed. I’m sorry, but that firm grip, those forearms—anyone would have. What was it about a cowboy? I didn’t know; I just saw it there in front of me. He was a lost thing, the antithesis of men you see in city elevators, carrying their cardboard latte cups and their paper bags with a scone inside.

“This is Jasper,” Kit said. He set his hand on the horse’s neck. The horse gave me an appraising look and then turned away. Who could blame him. He found out all he needed with one glance.

“He’s very large,” I said. I hoped it sounded like a compliment.

“You don’t ride? With a ranch in the family?”

“I’ve lived in Seattle all my life.” All I could think about, aside from Marlboro Men minus the cigarettes, were those stories of horses kicking people in the head. Even Jasper’s breathing was powerful. I tried again to get on his good side. “He has very pretty feet,” I said. “I like his stockings.”

“Jas is my pilot horse.” Kit patted Jasper’s huge side. “Right, buddy?”

Pilot horse. I didn’t have time to ask what that meant. We’d arrived at a trailer next to a truck with a huge barrel tank. “You might call this our lunchroom,” Kit said. Several coolers were set outside on a folding table, and he reached inside one, tossed me a cold, wet water bottle. It didn’t have a label and was made from thick plastic; filled, I suspected, from the truck, one of many water-hauling vehicles I could see around the site, some with spigots on the side. I was grateful for it. The woman in the jeans stood nearby, eating a slice of watermelon. She wore a purple sweatshirt and had long hair pulled into a barrette, and she was clearly a better woman than I, as neither the long hair nor the sweatshirt seemed remotely doable in this weather.

“Lorraine!” Kit called. “This is Callie. From Tamarosa. I told her I’d show her around.”

I didn’t miss the way she briefly raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“Visiting niece of the crazy old lady,” I confirmed.

“Well, it’s nice you came out,” Lorraine said. “See for yourself what we’re up to. It’s good to get the facts. We care about these horses as much as anyone, as I’m sure he told you. They’ll get the treatment they need. They’ll get adopted out. All the stuff you hear…a lot of misinformation.”

I nodded. It was the same nod I gave at my friend Anne’s poetry readings, just after she finished the last line and slowly shut the book. It was the false gesture of thoughtful understanding, one that we’d all perfected in Seattle. With the numerous art openings and literary readings, it came in handy when facing unsettling childbirth metaphors and confusing canvases. You could throw in a variation by adding a quiet hmm. What a surprise to find this useful here.

“Let me show you around,” Kit said.

I followed Kit and Jasper to a corral near the trailer, which had temporary stalls and a covered area for shade. There were troughs of water inside, and Kit led Jasper in for a drink and a rest. “This is where we keep our guys on their off-time. That’s Cactus, Lorraine’s horse.” I could only see the back of him; he was brown with a twitchy tail. “You know, I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I wanted to see what the new neighbors were up to,” I said. “Maybe you were really building a strip mall.”

“We’re building something, all right. Come on.”

We walked to the line of semis, where more supplies were being unloaded and stacked. He kicked a pile of plastic netting with the toe of his boot. “Step one.”

“That’s a lot of plastic.”

“And a lot of fencing.” Another kick, at a pile of indefinable metal. “When we finally get the delivery that ended up in Cheyenne this morning, we’ll have us some large chutes. They’ll start way out there.” He pointed to an area of land that was still only dirt and scrub. “Picture a well-organized maze leading to a corral. It’s a pretty simple setup. The horses are guided through the chutes, and then we mouth them, sort them. Studs, dry mares, mares with colts. The young, the old, any needing medical care.”

“Mouth them?” I wasn’t even sure I’d heard that right. I had a hundred questions suddenly. It was a whole slice of life I knew nothing about, which makes you realize just how many such slices there are.

“Check their teeth. The size, the shape. It tells us their age.”

“Then what?”

“We let them rest for a while. Then we take them to holding facilities—our own BLM stables, not far from here—where they get their freeze brand, vaccinations, blood tests, checkups by a vet. All that good stuff before they go up for adoption.”

“And how do you get them to come here?”

“Helicopter. Helicopter and Jasper, mostly. I know what you’ve probably heard, but it’s the most humane way we know. Well, sometimes we do the water traps, which are easier on the horses, sure. But helicopters take much less time, and sometimes time is something you don’t have. The chopper starts the horses moving in the right direction, and then the pilot’ll back off.” He demonstrated with his hand. “We let them move at their own pace until they need to be turned. Jasper and I, a couple of other guys, help down on the ground, lead in the strays. But that won’t be for a bit. All this takes a while to set up.”

“I can imagine.” One of the semitrucks rumbled to a start. The driver yelled something out his open window and then pulled forward, out and away, kicking up dirt and spitting rocks.

We kept walking. “Fuel trucks, water-hauling trailers.” Kit hooked his thumb toward them.

“A lot of water-hauling trailers.”

“You bet, out here. Some regions hire all this out. An independent contractor comes in and handles everything. Imagine a wedding planner, where all that’s required of you is to step in and say, I do. We’re a little more hands-on. Okay, that and we’re cheap. You can’t imagine how much this whole damn thing costs.”

An old guy whistled to get Kit’s attention. He had a big belly that pressed against his shirt and a belt buckle the size of a dinner plate, and he and Kit communicated something with arms and hand gestures. I recognized Steve Miller, too, from the other night, riding a brown horse out by what looked like a very large RV.

Then I realized. “You’re the boss.”

“Well,” Kit said. He rubbed his chin, where there was a new patch of stubble. In spite of his command on a horse, Kit could be shy. I’d noticed this at the bar, too. I was also a person who often had to fake my confidence before it actually arrived, and I could spot one of my kind.

I followed Kit’s lead, keeping pace next to him, as we headed away from the site. “You said this takes awhile,” I asked. “How long? Harris at the ranch said weeks.”

“That’s about right.”

“You stay at the Nugget all that time? Don’t you miss home and family, being gone that long?”

“Nevada is home, unless I get transferred again. I have a place in Henderson. It’s closer to my daughter in Riverside, California. She’s the only family I miss. She lives with her mom there.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“That must be tough.”

“Tough and still new. I’m trying to adjust to it, being on my own again. But, yeah, this kind of work is hard on people. You get moved a lot—Wyoming, Montana, Nevada. Marriage is hard enough without that.”

“No kidding.”

“How long you been married?”

“Twenty-two years.”

He let out a low whistle. “Wow, that’s something. It’s too rare anymore.”

“He’s a good man,” I said. “You know, we have our things. But, still.”

“That’s great,” Kit said. “That’s good to hear. You deserve a good man. I know we just met, but that’s clear.”

“I guess good people can have their problems, too.”

“Isn’t that the truth.” We’d arrived at a spot where we could see the whole enterprise stretched out in front of us, and we stopped. “Well, one of our problems, Kate and me, was all this.” He swept his arm out to indicate all that land. “My former wife grew up with cities and shopping and good restaurants.”

“No sign of a Nordstrom out there.”

He grinned. “Nope.”

“How’d you meet?”

“Wedding. In Montana. One of her college friends met a BLM guy. It sounds like a romantic life until you’re stuck in a small town where a night out is KFC and a blanket under the moon.”

“Don’t you go knocking KFC.” I shook my finger at him.

“Blankets under the moon?”

“Love them,” I said.

Now I felt shy. Kit scratched the back of his neck. I looked off in the distance as if studying the big picture. I lived in the city, with good restaurants on every corner, and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise. We ate Indian food; we ordered Moroccan. Thomas was a city planner who worked in a high-rise. Still, since the very night I arrived, something had been happening to me in the desert. In spite of the crisis at home, I slept well. I slept hard, as if my tired, wandering spirit recognized home. The heat and the hard work, the no-nonsense approach to a problem, whether that problem was a band of wild horses or a forest-service man—I understood it. I may never have lived there, but that ranch had been in my blood for generations.

“So where are they now? The horses.”

“Between you and the old Flying W. They move around. You said you saw them once?”

“Practically in Nash’s front yard, if you could call it a yard. She said, They’re back. I thought it meant they migrated or something.”

Kit laughed. “No. They don’t migrate. They just travel around very large stretches of land, and that’s why you may not see them. For years, even. They’re always here, though. Doing what every living thing does—mating, finding food, fighting for what they got. Still, when they happen to make an appearance right near you like that…”

“I don’t even have words for it.”

“None of this means”—he shook his head—“that I don’t get it. We all do. We have a regard for them, better believe it. We understand why folks get worked up. The mustangs are damn romantic in some respects. I see that. How can you not see that? But you’ve got your romantic and you’ve got the truth of the matter. And, to be clear, this isn’t about ranchers and cattle. We’re not here to help ranchers make money. We’re here to protect the land. That’s our job. The land and every species on it, including the horses themselves, including the vegetation that gets depleted or even endangered by too much grazing. Those plants are our job, too. We look after the best interests of everything by finding the right balance. You should see what happens to those horses when some of these places wait too long to do a gather, though. The disease—they’re dehydrated. They die of thirst or starvation. There just gets to be too damn many of them.”

“I understand,” I said. “I do.” I didn’t, not really. I knew nothing about this. “Even Nash…I don’t think she’s acting out of some great love for them.”

“I get it. Human interference in the nonhuman world? The natural order, et cetera…”

“She’s not exactly been clear what the boot-throwing has been about.”

“Most of these guys? Like Jerry, there? And Neal?” He nodded his head toward the old guy, far away now. “It’s the family business. Dad was a rancher or they had a few hundred acres in a town with a rodeo. But you’ve also got guys like Steve and me, who read Emerson in college, and then that was it. Done. We have the same ideals that the people suing us have, I’ll tell you that.”

“I can see it,” I said. “In you, right now.” It was true. His eyes were passionate and locked with mine as he spoke.

He shook his head, laughed at himself. “I guess we spend a lot of time defending ourselves, and you’re not even disagreeing. You know what? I don’t want to talk about this shit. I don’t really care about a tour, to be honest. I was hoping to see you again, is all.”

His confession surprised me. I was pleased, more than I should have been. I wasn’t sure until then that he wasn’t just doing his job.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“You asked where they were. I’ll show you, if you’d like. I can drive you back, right past them, and then you don’t have to walk all that way, either.”

“I’d like that.”

I rode beside Kit with the windows down. The seat of the truck was hot, so hot it burned the back of my legs. We jostled over the rough ground, and I did some anthropological work, studying his truck for information about him and the life he led. There was a handheld radio in a holster and a compass in a rolling ball on his dashboard; a green knapsack was tossed on the floor, with the cord of a phone charger sticking out. On the seat between us were an open bag of pretzels and the hat he’d just taken off. Not much to go on until he flipped his visor to shield his eyes from the sun. There was a picture clipped to a garage-door opener—a little girl with a big smile and Kit Covey’s blond hair, standing at the side of a pool and holding a blow-up shark in the air like a barbell.

“The goddamn AC broke yesterday. Sorry for the heat,” Kit said. He put on his sunglasses.

“I don’t mind.” I was sweating from the temperature and from watching that jawline of his as he drove. I tried to imagine him as a father and what he was like as a husband with a wife. We jounced and jolted around Washoe Lake, past its farthest side, out beyond where I’d ever gone before. I knew the area was spotted with many old divorce ranches; I recalled hearing about the Flying W and Washoe Pines. Harris had worked at Washoe Pines when he was young, if I remembered right, and even for a few years after that, when it, like the rest of those places, became a cattle ranch again after divorce laws began to change.

It looked so dry and desolate out there, you’d think the land was dead or dying. But the desert crackled with life, thriving on that very deception; the animals blended in, the plants looked long gone but were only waiting for the renewal of a rainstorm. I saw a burro, and tumbleweeds, and cacti. This was a place that had lasted, in good part because only certain plants, animals, and people could take the heat.

“Here,” Kit Covey said. He yanked the parking brake.

“Here?” I asked. There was only dry brown hills and a single saguaro.

He fished around under his seat, retrieved a leather case that held a pair of binoculars. “Come on.”

We got out. I stood beside him, aware of his shoulder next to mine. He looked into the binoculars and then handed them to me. They were unfocused or I was being stupid, because I could only see my own eyelashes.

“Nothing?” Kit asked. He stood behind me. I could feel his chest against my back, and then his arms reached around. He turned the ridged dial and pointed me in the right direction.

“Wait!” I said. “There they are!”

Brown, white, black—a grouping. They were huddled near a small creek bed that looked dry. Some had their heads down, as if for a drink, and some stood nearby, tails flicking.

“Is there even any water in there?” I asked.

“Not much, and that’s the problem. We’ve been monitoring drought conditions since summer started, and it’s bad. No water, and decreased vegetation because of it. We’ve been supplementing the natural seeps and filling tubs and troughs and even giving hay to the horses. Unfortunately, these animals are skittish. They won’t drink from the man-made containers. Even with the extra water, the seeps don’t provide enough to sustain them.”

“You bring them water.” It seemed impossible.

“We do. Still, you can bring a horse water, but you can’t make him drink. Do you see that black one?”

I did. He stood on a small dirt-and-rock hill, grazing, though there wasn’t much to graze. “Yeah. He looks like Jasper.”

“He’s the stud. That’s his harem.”

“Every guy’s dream, huh?” I said.

“Not mine.”

I watched for a while. It felt astonishing to find myself where I was right then. I watched those horses with Kit beside me, and I felt a soaring inside my chest. Life seemed so beautifully large. I spotted a foal, and then another. I thought of the chutes and mazes and what they would mean to these animals.

“They’re families.” I could see that now. There’s where the problem deepened. “You said you try to keep the mares and foals together, though, right?”

“We do our best,” he said.

I handed Kit his binoculars. He took the two lens caps from his pocket and replaced them. His head was bent down, and after the extraordinary thing I’d just seen, it was such a familiar, ordinary gesture that I felt like I’d known him for years. I was struck by it. I might have lived this life if my mother had made different choices, or if I myself had. I still could. There were so many possible lives to lead. Every day, you chose your life, even if you could forget that.

“Ready?” he asked.

—

“Maybe you should let me off here,” I said, when we reached the tall arch of Tamarosa.

Kit yanked the brake but left the engine running. “Your aunt knows the sound of my truck, probably.”

“She’d send me home packing, sitting here with the likes of you.”

“How many boots does the woman have?”

“She has a whole room just for the ones with steel toes.”

“I believe it,” he said. “Hey, Callie…”

I waited. We sat there a minute. Had he shut off that engine, it would have been silent.

“Thanks for not jumping to conclusions. For being interested.”

“I think it’s fascinating,” I said.

“And thanks for the fine company. It’s good to remember what that’s like.”

“For sure,” I said.

The wrinkles by his eyes, and the way he smiled, and this quality he possessed, a combination of gentleness and strength—I didn’t know what to say for myself. He did a small thing then: He took my wrist. He circled it with his thumb and index finger and gave it a little shake. That was all, and then he let it go.

My wrist kept feeling those fingers around it as I walked back toward the house. Hours later it did. The gesture was a conversation. Something had been acknowledged and agreed upon. I could never hurt Thomas, and that was understood.

Still, I thought about that raccoon, the one Thomas hit on our first date, the one he wanted to bring into the car. I thought about Kit Covey speaking the word protect. It was an old word, a powerful word. A word you felt in some deep, ancient part of you.

The thing was, I had lived long enough to know that the ancient places were the ones that kept calling, with the hushed persistence of troubled ghosts.

—

“How’s work going?” I asked.

“Stop trying to change the subject.”

“Have you been able to go to Greenlake and do some swimming?”

“Swimming? Really? What does it matter? You should see him, Mom!”

“Melissa,” I said. “Calm down.” I sat in the kitchen chair near the old wall phone, feeling calm myself, calmer than I had a right to. Actually, what had settled inside me was more likely one of calm’s relatives: resoluteness, or maybe surrender. I felt it curling up and tucking down its chin, same as Hugo used to.

“Mom!”

“You need to relax.”

“He’d gone through all the cereal bowls. They were stacked in the sink. It was disgusting!”

It was hard for children to understand that there were things about their parents they didn’t know. We parents accepted that fact about them much more easily than the other way around. Oh, how I loved my babies; oh, how large was the loss of their growing up, but your children could be such know-it-alls. “He’s a grown man. He shouldn’t have gotten you involved.”

Shaye stood nearby, mouthing What? What? as I talked on the phone, which was still attached to the wall by this relic that was once called a cord. You can see them in museums. I couldn’t walk away from Shaye if I wanted to, so I waved my hand at her to go away, turned my back.

“I was the one who went over there; he didn’t invite me. I brought him some brownies, since I knew you were gone. He was freaking out. He said he tried to call you all day and you didn’t answer.”

“I told you, I was on a nature hike. My battery drained, searching for service. I didn’t even know it was dead.”

“You always told us it was irresponsible not to keep our phones charged!”

“You were learning to drive. I was trying to make you feel guilty so I wouldn’t have to worry you were lying in a ditch somewhere.”

Melissa sighed loudly and dramatically. In the moment of silence that followed, I was sure she was considering her options: send me to my room, or ground me. I admit this was slightly thrilling. I really should have rebelled all those years ago; a lack of teen rebellion must guarantee a crisis later in adult life. “Do you know why he was in a panic?” she asked.

“Given that he encouraged me to stay out here, not exactly,” I said.

“This morning, when you guys talked, you asked him to overnight you your camera.”

“Yes? So?”

“You haven’t cared about your camera for a long, long time. When was the last time you even wanted to take pictures?”

“There are some things I’m dying to capture out here. It’s beautiful, Mel.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Mom. That’s exactly what I’m saying! That kind of stuff doesn’t matter to you. No wonder he’s freaking out.”

“Melissa. You’re—” My darling firstborn, with her beautiful shiny hair and ability to dance and her stubborn streak—I loved her more than life itself. They would never know, your children, how full your heart was for them, aching full. They’d never understand the way you saw them all ages at once, from their first day on earth to now. When I looked at Melissa, I saw her newborn eyes asking mine every significant question, and I saw her in that pink apron offering me Play-Doh food, and I saw her as a Disney princess on Halloween. I saw her left-out junior-high self and the first time she was someone’s girlfriend. I saw the small daughter and the joyful daughter and the door-slamming daughter and the newly adult daughter with her own tiny refrigerator in her own kitchen. They were all one to me, familiar as my own self. I guess I was a pretty big know-it-all, too.

“I’m what? What, Mom? Tell me.”

“There are things you—”

“There are things I what?” she said.

“I know you mean well. But this isn’t your business. And your dad can do his own dishes, if he feels like it. Or not.”

“You need to come home!”

Who could blame her for her frustration and her outrage? It was our fault, Thomas’s and mine. Not for where we were now, but for what we’d abandoned in all the years of her growing up. Our lives were about our children, and now our daughters rested in the power and certainty of that. It was a good thing, a fine thing, as long as no one changed the rules.

“I’ve got to go. Aunt Shaye is making breaded veal cutlets.”

“You and Dad have lost your minds,” she said.

—

“Shaye, do you care if I shut that off? That show just gets to me.”

Dr. Yabba Yabba Love had cut to a commercial for J. J.’s Autos and Annabelle’s restaurant, but now she was back, shouting from the radio in her silk-gravel, tough-love preacher voice. A bad childhood is no excuse for being an asshole.

“Go ahead, but every other station out here is fuzzy,” Shaye said. “I’m surprised she can say asshole on the air.”

“Nash probably has some old records.”

“Look around. I have to watch so these don’t burn.”

I found a stash of albums in the old cabinet under the record player, and I slid an LP from its sleeve. It was a sense memory—holding the disc by its edges, hearing the crackle as the needle hit vinyl. This was four goofy guys in bow ties, not the Earth, Wind & Fire of my youth, but still. Records. Tex stood at the living room window, looking out into the darkness, waiting for Nash’s return. I turned up the music, left Tex to his work.

The crooners were going at it. “Sentimental Me.” I danced Shaye away from the frying pan, her spatula just over my shoulder. “Dip me, baby,” she said, but when I tried, she said, “Oh, shit, ow, that hurts,” and I gave up the idea.

I tried to sing along, making up the words. “So in love with you, bring me back my shoe, if you ever do…” I belted.

“Set the table, would you,” Shaye said.

I made couples out of the knife and spoon, just as I did when I was a child, leaving poor fork out by himself. “She’s been gone a long time,” I said to Shaye. “Maybe I should go check on her.”

“I’m sure she knows the way to her own mailbox. Wait ’til you taste these. Why do people not eat these anymore?”

“Um, you remember what veal is?”

“I’m trying to forget that part. It didn’t bother anyone in the old days.”

“In the old days, they ate liverwurst. And, oh, man, liver and onions. When I was a kid, I never thought of it as an actual liver.”

“Tomorrow I’m making stew.”

“I remember stew! And biscuits?”

“White bread with margarine. We had that every night. When did every loaf of bread become artisan? Don’t get me wrong, I love artisan bread. I could live off the stuff.”

“I’m going to check on her.”

Tex agreed it was a good idea, and about time, too, because he scurried to the door and pushed ahead of me. Outside, the swing was still lying at an angle on the porch, as if it had suddenly needed a rest. I could hear the crooners far away now. It smelled good out there, like warm clay and dry herbs. Still, desert dark was darker than any other, and that old pool looked sad and abandoned in the light of the moon, and I shivered. I wondered what Kit Covey’s room looked like at the Carson Nugget.

“Nash?” I called.

No answer. I began to worry. There was a lot of rocky ground and dead-of-night out there. I remembered what Harris had told us. Maybe she took off somewhere. Maybe, not in her right mind, she was wandering out by the lake. We would have to make plans to put her in a home, a care facility, her uprooted belongings stuffed into one wretched room.

But then I saw her walking back up the road, her back hunched as she sorted through the mail. “I can’t see a damn thing out here,” she said.

“I told you I’d get it,” I said.

“Probably I could get back to the house with my eyes closed,” she said.

“Let’s not try that.”

“Oh, let’s do. I’ll be Helen and you be Anne Sullivan.” Nash cracked up at her own joke, her shoulders moving up and down as she chuckled away. Tex trotted happily ahead, lifted his leg on a creosote bush.

“Safe and sound,” I called to Shaye when we were back in. It smelled so good in there. Frying food, and something with garlic.

“I didn’t kick the bucket while I was out getting the mail,” Nash shouted. “The Ames Brothers! Listen to them. Now, that’s music.” She snapped her fingers, three jazzy clicks to the beat. “Mmm, that smells delicious.”

Nash sat in a kitchen chair, shuffled through bills and ad flyers. “Fix me one of those drinks you girls made the other night, would you?”

I got out the small glasses and the ice-cube tray—one of those kinds from the dark ages, metal, with the little handle you pulled up. I cracked them free, chased one escaping cube across the kitchen counter. With the Ames Brothers and the popping of grease and Shaye shaking the pan against the burner while chatting about the time their mail went missing for three days, I didn’t notice that Nash had gone silent until I turned to give her the drink. She sat in that kitchen chair and clutched an envelope. She didn’t look well. Her skin had gone slack, and I realized just how old she was.

“Nash?”

“Holy Christ,” she whispered.

“What’s the matter?”

Was she crying? She was not the crying type. But she wiped her eyes and set the letter in her lap with a shaking hand. The writing on the envelope was spidery. I tried to read it. “Jack?”

Shaye took the pan off the stove, and we looked at each other. I put my arms around Nash. Her shoulders didn’t feel broad at all; it’d been my memory that made them so solid. They were small, and they were trembling.

“Nash,” I said. “Nash, it’s okay.”

Of course, it wasn’t okay. Not much was okay in that room, for any of us. Tex, maybe, and even he had an uncertain future.

Nash’s eyes were sunken and small, and the thin skin of her cheek was wet. “All these years,” she said. “A man like that. I wasn’t sure if he was even alive.”

“Well, see?” I said. “He is.” I didn’t know what I was saying, what news I was helping to deliver. Maybe someone didn’t die after all. Maybe just love had, and now here it was again. I squeezed her hand.

“I’ve missed that charming bastard for sixty years. I thought for sure he was gone for good.”

Summer of ’51, Shaye mouthed to me, but it wasn’t the time for that now.

“You see?” I said to Nash. “There you go. You never know.”

I rubbed my thumb along the smooth tissue-paper skin of her hand. There was the crackle of the needle between songs.

I was right. You never did know. It was what made the whole damn trip so hard, and so worthwhile.