Sometimes it’s only when you stop thinking that you see what’s staring you in the face. I was cursing that damn snowmachine and Thomas, who’d made us get it before he up and left, and then the lightbulb went on.
If Bess or the kid had to take shelter somewhere, the only place they’d have gone would be Thomas’s house. And as if figuring that out fixed everything, the machine started rumbling. It’s stupid, but it got my hopes up. Old Freeman turned up right then and I don’t think I was ever so happy to see him. He said that Cornelia couldn’t stand being cooped up anymore and that he’d decided to come make sure we were all right. I think he said something about it being one winter too many for him, that he wasn’t going to be staying, but I was only half listening. Sure, I appreciated seeing him, but I didn’t give him the details, I didn’t have the time. I just told him to make himself at home in my house, that I might need his help when I got back. Cornelia was running around me and barking, nipping at my glove like she always did with the kid. I was in no mood to play. I grabbed the shovel and threw it on the rig in case I had to do some digging and I set off as fast as I could, like my life depended on it, never mind that they might have already both lost theirs.
They say it’s only when people are gone that you realize just how much you care about them. Everyone around me’s gone: Thomas, my folks, Faye, Bess, the kid. Like everything’s over and now I just have to shut the door behind me, turn the key one last time in the lock, and leave this place, this land where everything’s frozen numb in the winter and rushed in the summer. This lost land where you even forget what you were before. This land that’s so harsh that only men can stand it, barely any woman would dare to make a life for herself there.
Strange that she’d want to come here after how hot Nevada was—her, that California girl, that redhead with golden skin, so sad when she stopped smiling, like some china cup that’s just been chipped—but she struck me as being as strong as a rock when she wanted to be. I thought New York was crazy, but it was nothing next to Las Vegas. That was where I saw her, with that cigarette dangling from her lips, a devilish little angel who couldn’t be bothered to choose between hell and heaven. I was done traveling with this kid who didn’t talk, and I’d decided that it was over: I’d buy him a one-way ticket to New York and send him off to his grandmother. After all, it couldn’t be that bad, no mother could be so bad as to make all her children run away. Someone’d be looking after him and I could go back to my old life. I was ashamed to feel relieved. Bess had sent us to a restaurant to wait for her, and when she found us, she ruffled the boy’s hair and he’d blushed and she asked me what I was doing there with my son.
My son. Funny how when those words came out of her mouth suddenly they felt like the truth. If it’d been decided that I had to be his father, that meant something, even if I didn’t quite see what. I looked at little Thomas, who was looking at Bess and smiling for the first time since we’d left the city he was born in, and I didn’t think twice before asking this woman what she was fixing to do for the next ten years.
“All a matter of what fate’s got in store for me,” she said, “but I’m a betting girl. I’ll pay good money to find out.”