The theme from The Exorcist poured out of Merry’s back pocket. She arched her butt up to retrieve her phone, looked at the screen, and winced. There were six missed calls from her mother, not including this last one. “Take a hint, woman!” she told the device.

“What’s that, hon?” Dolly looked over at Merry. She had one hand on the steering wheel of her battered old pickup, the other arm out the open window, and an inquisitive expression on her face as the wind teased her gingery hair. She was taking the winding road to Taos with the ease of someone intimately familiar with it.

“Oh, just my mother.” Merry stuck the phone back into her jeans pocket and unconsciously smoothed her unruly brows. “She’ll call about twenty-five times more, until I pick up. It’s never anything urgent, unless you consider the shameful state of my wardrobe or my skin-care regimen an emergency.”

Dolly cracked a smile. “You two not too keen on one another?”

“Oh, she’s keen on me,” Merry said. “Keen to change everything about me, that is.”

Dolly laughed. “Had me a mother like that. Wanted me to be a beauty queen, if you can believe it. Took me traipsing all over New Mexico trying to enter me in two-bit kiddie pageants. Me! I was practically born in a pair of shitkickers.”

Merry knew the feeling. If she had her way, they’d bury her in sweatpants. “So what did you do?”

“Got so bad, I started faking I was sick the morning before we’d set out on one of those stupid auditions. But it wasn’t ’til I hit upon the idea of drawing spots on my face that she finally took the hint. I only meant to dab on some chicken pox, but I used a Sharpie marker ’cause I didn’t know any better. Wouldn’t come off for about two weeks, and the whole time I was looking like Raggedy Ann.” She chuckled. “That was the end of that.”

“I wish it were that simple for me.” Merry sighed. “At least back when I skied I could get Mother off my case a little.”

“Is that why you did it?” Dolly wanted to know.

“Skied, you mean?”

Dolly nodded.

Merry looked out the window, letting the question settle in as the dramatic scenery sped by in tones of rust and sage and sand. She wanted to say yes. Her mother had pushed and pushed, and had as much as come out and said that Merry was only satisfactory as long as she could bring home gold. But she couldn’t honestly claim her whole career had been about making her mother proud. She’d made herself proud too. There’d been nothing like the rush…the feeling of her body obeying every command, of being powerful, graceful, even fierce…instead of just a freak. Since she’d first picked up poles when she was three years old, nothing had ever made Merry feel so at home, so herself, as skiing.

No. She hadn’t done it for her mother. She’d done it for her own satisfaction, and if it got Gwendolyn off her back in the process, so much the better. “Let’s just say it was a point of commonality,” Merry said, “and once it was gone…well, these days we have fewer and fewer safe subjects to discuss.”

Merry’s phone played Tubular Bells again. She ground her tush into the car seat as if that might shut her mother up.

“You gonna keep ducking your ma forever?”

Maybe I can claim to be out of range for a little while longer. Or fake like I fell off a cliff. They were, after all, driving along the rim of the very steep Rio Grande gorge at the moment. But as much as she might fantasize doing a Thelma and Louise to escape reality, that would probably fly about as well as a ’66 Ford Thunderbird. “I’ll have to deal with her sooner or later,” Merry acknowledged. “There’s some family business that needs deciding, and they want to see me for Thanksgiving.”

“You should invite them out to the ranch,” Dolly surprised her by saying. “Might be nice, getting to meet your folks, and we always make enough food for an army.”

Merry choked on a laugh. The image of Gwendolyn Hollingsworth Manning at the Last Chance, surrounded by Dolly’s menagerie, was beyond absurd. And her father…Pierce would be gracious, of course, but she couldn’t really see him sitting down at Dolly’s kitchen table and tucking in to one of her homely meals.

Marcus might like it though. Merry smiled at the thought of her suave supermodel brother kicking back with a bunch of farm animals…and Sam Cassidy.

“That’s kind of you, Dolly. But I wouldn’t dream of imposing”—inflicting was more like it—“on you or Sam that way. You’ve already been so hospitable, and I’m sure I’ll have found my next gig by then.” She changed the subject before Dolly could insist. “Oh, hey, looks like we’re coming up to Taos!”