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.

  Nash cracks the ice free from the tray and chases a cube as it skates across the counter. She catches it just before it falls to the floor. She puts it, and a few others, into the copper mugs. In goes a shot of vodka, a few inches of ginger beer, a twist of lime. Nash keeps the vodka to a minimum in Ellen’s drink. Three nights ago, she and Veronica and Ted from Washoe Pines went to the Old Corner bar, and Ellen didn’t just dance with a cowboy, she kissed one. Her lipstick ended up on the side of her cheek, and her hair had gone as wild as if it had survived an act of God and was still too shocked to speak of it. Mother always said that change had its own clock, but Nash feels it might be best to slow Ellen’s down a little. All the late nights and men and alcohol make it seem like change is heating up and rising like boiling water about to spill over on the stove, and although this is how it usually goes, it feels like an imminent disaster now that Nash is in charge.

  That morning, Alice phoned to tell her she might be gone another few weeks. A few weeks! There’s been the sudden decision to move Gloria in with a friend, since she won’t leave California. Something else is going on, Nash is sure of it. It’s not just the latest creep, Billy what’s-his-name, leaving Gloria. Not many things would keep Alice from the ranch that long.

  “Here you go,” Nash says, and hands around the drinks.

  “She’s an ox,” Veronica says, and takes her glass. “Her rear end is bigger than Zorro’s.”

  “Oh, you’re cruel,” Ellen says.

  “Correct, but cruel,” Hadley says.

  “I met her before, you know,” Veronica says. “With Gus. At a fundraiser for the Field Museum. The husband looked long-suffering. Like he’d been left outside on a winter night and never let back in.”

  “She has children, poor things,” Ellen says.

  “Don’t worry, they no doubt have a nanny,” Hadley says.

  Ellen sips her mule. “A nanny! I can’t even imagine that.”

  The ox is Mrs. Morris Shumley, who Nash picked up at the Reno train station that afternoon. After her six weeks are up and she’s had her day at the Washoe County Courthouse, Mrs. Morris Shumley will have to reacquaint herself with her own first name. But this is how she introduced herself as she shook Nash’s hand with her gloved one as the crowd at the station closed around them. This is how she presented herself to the rest of the girls, too: She politely made their acquaintance and then retreated to her room, as if the introductions were a tawdry piece of business now concluded.

  “She wants nothing to do with us harlots,” Lilly Marcel says. Her round stomach has grown so much in one week. She leans back a little when she walks now.

  “I want nothing to do with you harlots, but I’m stuck with you,” Hadley says.

  “A nanny.” Ellen still can’t imagine it.

  “I want to see the ox on the back of a horse,” Veronica says, which makes them all laugh. “No wonder Mr. Shumley dumped her like a hot potato. He probably hasn’t had—”

  “Don’t even say it, Veronica,” Ellen giggles.

  Hadley claps her hands over her eyes. “I’m seeing it now. The way he shudders for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Stop!” Ellen says. She is bent over, laughing. She holds her hand up in the air.

  Veronica shakes out a cigarette. “She seems to have forgotten that she’ll be a divorcée now, too.”

  “It’s an awful word, isn’t it?” Ellen says. “Divorcée.”

  “I think it sounds rather glamorous,” Veronica says.

  “There was a divorcée who lived down our street,” Ellen says. “The first one I ever saw. She had beautiful clothes. I watched her house, imagining that strange men would be picking her up in various cars or that her children would set off bombs in the yard, but nothing interesting happened. Her grass turned brown, is all. And then she moved away.”

  “You must find a way to keep the grass green.” Hadley shakes her finger at Ellen. She means it.

  “I might have to get a job at a department store,” Ellen says. “That divorcée, she sold perfume at the Emporium. I don’t know the first thing about selling perfume at the Emporium.”

  Cook baked a ham for dinner, and there are steaming beans and scalloped potatoes and buttery rolls and peas. As they move to the big table for dinner, there is the swish of chiffon against stockings. Veronica’s dress is gold with silver embroidery, and Ellen is in a green formal with netting to fill out the skirt, with a black taffeta jacket over the top. Hadley wears red, with a cut of gown that shows off her bare neck, and Lilly is in pink satin, with a pink wrap off her shoulders. Their hair is perfectly coiffed after a visit to the hairdresser in the city earlier that day; the smell of Lustre-Creme and the bitter-metal odor from Hadley’s permanent wave are masked with L’Origan. The meal is hurried, then cut short entirely when Jack and Danny arrive. They are taking the ladies to Cal Neva Resort in Tahoe, where Johnny Y. Michaels will be performing.

  “Don’t look so down, Peanut,” Jack says. He’s wearing his nicest shirt, with the pearl snaps, and he’s doused himself with aftershave. “Three more short years, you’re free to go anywhere.”

  They take off. She is left behind with that ham and Boo and Mrs. Morris Shumley, who will likely stay in her room reading novels, same as Nash. The similarity of their evening is humiliating.

  Nash helps clean up the dishes, and then Irma unfastens her apron with a sigh and leaves for the night. One time, Nash and Gloria rode in the backseat when Alice picked up the ladies at Cal Neva after Cat Callahan performed. Nash was just a child then. She remembers the tall, flashing lights of the CAL NEVA sign outside the lodge, the crowd spilling out the doors. There was the energy of a party and the smell of alcohol and cigarettes as the women piled into the car. There was high-pitched hilarity, a sense of carelessness and freedom, and it all felt dangerous to her young self, up way too late.

  In her room, Nash picks up Boo for a dance. “You look lovely in fur,” she says to him, but he’s unimpressed. She sets him down, and he eyes her warily from the floor. Nash has Johnny Y. Michaels’s record. He is singing into a microphone on the front, his eyes sleepy-looking, his dark hair as shiny as the satin lapels of his jacket. Nash imagines Jack dancing with Lilly Marcel, holding her carefully, the bump of Beanie against him. She imagines Lilly Marcel’s neck smelling of Jack’s aftershave. There is something lewd about his interest in a girl, a woman, who is in the family way, isn’t there? He shouldn’t see her as her own, separate self; her body isn’t just hers. Nash flings the record and it hits the leg of her desk. She doesn’t even like Johnny Y. Michaels all that much.