This is more than Nash can take. She has no idea how her mother does it. The ranch is so much weightier than horses and cowboys and cocktails, and the job just feels too large for her. She wants to go to her room and shut the door, to disappear into the understanding silence and faithful comfort of a book, but Mrs. Shumley’s eyes are nearly bulging from her head. Nash is so angry with Jack that she doesn’t even want to ask, but she can’t help it. “Three-eyed snake?”

  “That attorney, Cox. One eye at the back of his head.” Jack grins.

  Oh, what that grin could do to her. Yet it leaves her cold right now. It’s odd. Something has shifted. Maybe loyalty. Maybe even love.

  “You hurt her,” Nash snaps.

  —

  “He was chewing tobacco in my company. It was hideous! I smelled it on him. It made me light-headed.”

  “It’s probably the altitude. It takes some getting used to.”

  Nash keeps her eyes on the road. A rabbit jets across, and Mrs. Shumley gasps. She leans forward from the backseat. Nash can feel Mrs. Shumley’s hot, sour breath on her cheek, and her gloved hands squeak as they grip the leather of the Styleline Deluxe.

  “It’s the tobacco. He doesn’t have the decency to smoke a proper cigarette. And those women! Let’s not call them ladies. Barely ever out of trousers!”

  “It must be very different for you here, compared to Chicago.”

  “How I will ever tell a soul I was in a place like this is beyond me.”

  Every single day will be over, Nash tells herself, even ones so hard and terrible. She tries to stay composed. The Mrs. Shumleys are rare. Nash hopes Mr. Shumley has fallen in love with a showgirl, who loves him back madly.

  “And don’t think I don’t know what’s going on after hours. That young woman in her condition!”

  Mrs. Shumley’s perfume is choking Nash. Her fat face falls, forming two jowls, same as a bloodhound. Danny is one thing. Nash couldn’t care less what Mrs. Shumley thinks about him. He couldn’t care less, either, knowing Danny.

  “We respect the privacy of our guests,” Nash says. She speaks with more bite than she intends, but Mrs. Shumley’s words poke at her, a finger jabbing an injury.

  “It’s her business that the baby isn’t even her husband’s? The blonde told me. The aging socialite.”

  For God’s sake! And can’t Veronica keep her mouth shut? Nash forgets that Veronica is smart. Veronica knows a big, fat gossip when she sees one. A gossip can be very useful.

  “You should be more careful about who you allow in, before it becomes a house of ill-repute. A married woman with another man’s child. She ought to be put away.”

  Nash has had enough. Her pride blazes, and so does her desire to protect, and it is all much showier and easier to recognize than the quiet envy she will wonder about only later. Jack is right: Nash is naïve. She doesn’t think far enough ahead. She’s still young enough to react to what’s on the surface, trusting whatever feelings arise, not looking above or beneath or beyond them to their impact or even to her own soundless but lurking motivations. She’s the impetuous gambler, putting every chip on red and letting the wheel fly, even if the game is rigged.

  “Stuart Marcel is that baby’s father, and I’ll swear on a Bible to that fact,” Nash snaps, as the stunned Mrs. Shumley finally sits back in her seat and huffs through her nose.

  The one who is hurt, the one who hurts—it’s a tangled story, always, and every human being can be small and mean and can do bigger harm than they intend. Nash reminds herself often: We all make mistakes. She has to tell herself this again and again. In acts large or small, with outcomes, too, that are large or small—we step forward with our imperfect choices; we set the timer ticking for sometimes terrible and often inevitable conclusions. How could she have known what a small world it really was when it seemed so very large to her, living her whole life on that ranch?

  Still. What she said that day in the car with Mrs. Shumley’s hot breath on her neck—it’s something she will never, her whole life long, forgive herself for.

  —

  Mrs. Shumley waits until Nash gets out and opens the door for her. Now she’s some kind of chauffeur? Fine. She will wait by the car with her arms folded, same as the chauffeurs at the Riverside Hotel. Mrs. Shumley can make her own way into Mr. Cox’s office. Good luck to her. Better luck, please dear God, to Mr. Shumley. May the showgirl have a headdress of feathers and a leotard of sequins and an undying love for the man. And, most of all, may someone save the poor children of that bitter woman. This is another problem of divorce, as far as Nash can tell. The spouse gets to flee the crazy husband or wife, but the children will be stuck with them for the rest of their unlucky days.

  Nash waits and waits. She’s wearing a suit, as they always do for trips to see an attorney, and the suit is hot. Her girdle is hotter still. She unpins her hat. It is boring, standing there like a chauffeur. She strolls down the street until she gets to the Wigwam Café, and then returns. She strolls a bit farther, and each time farther still, like a toddler from its mother. She passes Union Federal Savings and Orchid Florist, then the new Eldorado Club, and Harold’s. She is nearly all the way to the Riverside Hotel when she sees a livestock truck. It’s parked along the street. It’s a strange sight, especially there. It has wood slats and a canvas top and a mean-nosed cab in front. Union Stockyards is written on the side in white curled letters. Something else brings her attention to the truck. There is a fluid dripping and gathering from the back, and a bad smell.

  She knows that’s the smell of blood, and yet somehow she can’t help herself. She’s in her nice suit, but she sets her hat and her handbag on the curb and climbs up one large tire and peers in. What she sees there—it’s beyond horror. Nash is not squeamish, not after growing up on a ranch. She has seen foals being born and bad wounds in flesh that has battled wire fence, but this is so far beyond that, she might be sick. Mangled bodies, torn hooves. Hides ragged and in ribbons from bullets. A foal, still alive, his eyes full of fear.

  She has heard about the hunters who use airplanes to run the mustangs into pens. There, they shoot them, haul them away, and then sell their bodies to companies that make dog food. She’s also heard of the government bounty hunters, who trap and kill the horses because they think of them as vermin, feral vermin, grazing on land that rightly belongs to cattle. And now she is seeing the evidence with her own eyes. How can this be? These are the very same horses held in high esteem in stories and lore and songs. Locations are named after them—Mustang Ridge and Wild Horse Canyon. How can you viciously destroy something so revered? They say that if you see those mustangs, you will never be the same, and now it’s true that Nash will never be the same.

  She hurries away from that truck. She is crushed at the wreckage. Her stomach turns, from what she’s seen and also with a dread that’s becoming insistent. She retrieves her hat and handbag and returns to the white building where the attorney’s office is. Strangely, it is not Mrs. Shumley who appears but Mr. Cox himself. He holds a pocket watch in one hand, looking ever so much like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

  “Mrs. Shumley will be moving to the Riverside Hotel.” He speaks quickly, obviously in a hurry. Late, late, for a very important date. “She find the conditions at Tamarosa unsuitable.” He holds his hands toward the sky as if he is giving up. Nash is grateful for that small act of generosity. “You can tell one of your boys to deliver her things.”

  He doesn’t wait for a reply. His shoes scuff-scuff-scuff up the stairs. Her mother would have offered Mrs. Shumley the hotel before she’d even asked. Alice didn’t over-tend to the fussy and miserable. She washed her hands of them, for her own sake and for the sake of the other guests. Nash’s mother had always believed that some folks relished their unhappiness, preferring to stay right where bitterness met envy, and she had no patience for those kinds of people. Nash remembers what happened after Mrs. Abigail Coldicott, who found the meals too heavy and the company tawdry, left. Alice had sat on the sofa, reading but not reading a National Geographic, flipping through the pages in irritation before tossing it to the pile with the others. Let her stew in her own juices somewhere else, she said.

  So Nash should perhaps be celebrating on the drive home, being rid of that ox. When she gets back, she should suggest that they all raise their glasses in a toast, to freedom from hypocritical acrimony. But she won’t. This is not the mood riding with her now as she heads back to the ranch, following the banks of the Truckee River out of the city of Reno. There was that trickle of blood from that trailer, and those terrified eyes. There are hunters and the hunted, cruelties both small and large, trickles of guilt, too.

  Mrs. Shumley, still in Fred Cox’s office, is already likely brimming with glee, though Nash doesn’t know this yet. In only a few days, the Whittakers will be visiting Reno, and if anyone will be interested to hear the latest about Stuart Marcel and that dreadful ranch, it’s Phyllis. What a delicious little nugget Mrs. Shumley will have to bring when they meet for dinner!

  Nash heads down River Road, past the last Chevron. The turn signal click-click-clicks. Right then she’s unaware of Mrs. Shumley’s twitch of eagerness, unaware of the Whittakers, unaware of just who knows whom. It’s no wonder, though, that she can’t shake the dark sense that things are going terribly, terribly wrong.

  We’d been sitting there for a good hour, waiting for the nurses to roll Nash back into her room. It was her second day in the hospital. The cancer often invaded the walls of blood vessels, we were told, which could cause these kinds of symptoms. All they could do was give us a status report with various scans and make her comfortable. Cells multiplied, expertly tending to their evil business as we fumbled daily life. I was hungry. Shaye was getting cranky. She tossed the National Geographic onto the stack of magazines on the green padded bench, after flipping through the pages in irritation. “Same old volcanoes,” she said. “Remember Grandma Shiny? She had piles of these things, going back centuries.”

  Grandma Shiny was Gene’s mother. She was our grandmother for the six years Gene and our mother were married, and then we never heard from her again. There were so many people who made a crucial appearance in your life and then disappeared. How did we let that happen? I suppose we couldn’t keep everyone who showed up or our lives would become as stuffed as my closets back home, but Grandma Shiny put up Christmas stockings with our names on them. She’d embroidered those names. We called her Grandma Shiny because she wore lots of sparkly jewelry. She even let us play in her jewelry box, where there were rings too large for our fingers and a charm bracelet with a tiny carriage with wheels that turned. Tucked in the bottom of that box was a small envelope with a creepy but awe-inspiring lock of Gene’s baby hair, much blonder and silkier than the bristly brown hair we knew.

  “Yeah. We’d hunt through them for pictures of naked tribesmen.”

  “Who cared about Aztecs and maps of how the Pompeii water system worked.”

  “Really. Just give us some droopy boobs and bare butts in loincloths. My God, it felt so dirty and wrong and thrilling.”

  “Kids today wouldn’t even care. Big deal. You see more than that in a PG movie.”

  “We sound like old people again.”

  “Rock ’n’ roll will destroy our youth,” Shaye said, shaking one fist in the air.

  “It makes me sad, thinking about Grandma Shiny.”

  “Me, too.”

  “She’s probably dead.”

  “Jeez, Cal.”

  “What? It’s true.”

  “Well, you don’t have to say it like that.”

  “She has probably passed on to her eternal rest.”

  Shaye made a face at me. “I hate hospitals. Why does time pass so slowly in hospitals? Every sick minute is sixty real-life minutes.”

  “You’d think being so close to the end would speed time up.”

  “Really.” She was looking around in the drawers of the nightstand, the way you do in boring motels.

  “You’re not going to find anything in there, believe me. I spent enough time in hospitals when Thomas’s mother was sick, and when Thomas’s mother wasn’t sick.”

  “Aha!” Shaye said. She held up a small packet, happy to prove me wrong.

  “Gauze? Okay, good for you, Shaye, you won the gauze lottery.”

  The hospital was not bringing out the best in us. We both heard the wheels coming down the hall and straightened up, ready to be on good behavior, but there was only the squeak of shoes on linoleum as the mound of a body under blankets passed.

  “I’m scared of what I’ll see every time,” Shaye said.

  “Me, too. You know, we’re going to be spending a lot of time here in the not-too-distant future,” I said.

  “Thanks for that. Thanks so much for another cheery news flash of something I already knew.”

  “I wonder if our real father is dead yet. Probably.”

  “I’m sure he is. Men don’t live as long. Do you think about it often? It was too bad we never knew him.”

  “I think it would have been a worse too bad if we did.”

  “Yeah. No doubt he was better in my imagination.”

  The next time, the sound of wheels and the squeak of shoes really did bring Nash. The nurse banged the poor woman and her gurney into the door and then into the wall, all the while talking in a voice used on toddlers. “Okay, Mrs. McBride! That wasn’t so bad! Let’s get ourselves settled back in! We’ll see what the doctor says about getting you home!”

  Then again, we weren’t any better. What was it about certain places that brought out your inner A-student? Hospitals and government buildings, churches—well, a person started speaking in sunny, functional exclamation points. You suddenly wanted to look like the kind of woman who baked pies. “Look what came while you were gone!” I said. I held up the flower arrangement. Daisies and carnations, a limp rose or two, all splayed against a fern-frond background.

  “Someone has a new admirer!” Shaye said.

  Nash narrowed her eyes at us. “Stop being so damn cheery. Who are they from?”

  I slipped the tiny card from the tiny envelope to show her. Nash didn’t quite look like herself in that blue gown with the white paisley teardrops, but she looked better. She’d had a shower and her hair was pulled back in her usual strong, steely braid, and she had color in her cheeks again. She wanted to get out of there. “Deke Donaldson,” I said. “J. J.’s Autos.”

  “Word gets around,” Shaye said.

  “That Harris has a big mouth. Deke Donaldson only wants to sell me the long-term auto-protection plan, and there’s no long-term anything in this picture.”

  “Oh, Nash,” I said.

  “We’ve got to get out of this place. I don’t have a lot of time left, and I need driving lessons.”

  I scooted the heavy green vinyl chair next to her. “Say we teach you to drive. What about a license? You’ll have to take the test.”

  “Yeah. And that eye exam…” Shaye said from over by the window.

  “I have a license. Everyone needs a license. Just because I don’t use it, doesn’t mean I don’t have one. I go in and get my eyes checked and get my picture taken every few years. I’ve got eyes like a hawk. I’m surprised you didn’t see it in my dresser drawer, with all the snooping you must be doing since I’m not there.”

  “Why bother snooping now that your room is sparse as a nun’s? And how have we had time for snooping? We’ve been right here with you almost this whole time.”

  I studied my fingernails, but Shaye told the lie right to Nash’s face without even blinking. She’d found that envelope from Jack Waters in Nash’s room the night before, taped to the bottom of the floor lamp, and she’d opened it. And when she did, she found a blank piece of paper inside, with one word on it in Nash’s distinctive handwriting: Gotcha. Shaye had bolted from the room, waving that paper in my face, but she didn’t go back in. She told me that getting caught made her feel like Nash was watching, even as she lay in a bed in room 222 at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center, being pumped full of fluids because that’s about all they could do for her. That, and a few hits of pain medicine. Her bones were beginning to ache now, too.

  “You going to drive somewhere with those pain pills in you?” I said. “We’ll take you where you want to go. We’ve told you a million times.”

  “It’s a trip I need to make alone. Of course I’m not going to drive under the influence. But, fine. All right. I’ll tell you what the big secret is. Might as well have it out.” She crooked her finger to Shaye and me. It was a dramatic, deathbed-ish gesture. We should have known better. We got in close, just as she wished, fools and eternal optimists that we were.

  “I’m writing a book,” she said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.

  “You’re a barrel of laughs,” Shaye said.

  Maybe it was the drugs singing through her, but Nash was having a whole lot more fun right then than we were.

  —

  “That’s good news, Cal,” Thomas said. “I’m glad she’s back home again where she belongs. I think maybe you need to come back home where you belong, too, right? I mean, it’s getting to be a long time. We need to talk.”

  When we took Nash in to Saint Mary’s, we’d phoned Gloria, and Gloria phoned Thomas, and Thomas phoned me, and there you had it. As Nash said, word gets around, and in a family, I supposed that’s how it should be.

  “You don’t need time alone anymore? What happened? I don’t want to come back to the way things were.”

  “I know you’re pissed, and I’m sorry. I was wrong not to tell you about the therapist. I was,” Thomas said. “But I miss you. I do. I want you home.”

  My silence wasn’t some sort of revenge for his. I had nothing to say. A wind was blowing through me. Inside, I echoed.

  “Cal, I don’t like how close we’re getting. To some…edge.” Thomas was talking fast, and I could feel his panic. I heard its rattle, even louder against the steel girders of my emptiness. “It’s scaring me. It’s a dangerous game we’re playing. Our whole marriage, all these years, it could fall in if we’re not careful.”