I had an image of a wagon train on a very long trail, high atop a canyon. A wagon train that had been traveling for months, its members emaciated from starvation and drought, the only remaining objects a gun without bullets and a hollow tin cup.

  “Twenty-two years,” he said. “You don’t just toss that. We’ve got to try to understand what’s going on. Get past it.”

  I could tell you exactly when things under our roof changed, the very moment that Thomas took his true first step away from me, a permanent and meant step, not the small, annoyed retreats of a marriage, the two steps back, the one step forward that can eventually lead to a deficit of steps. It happened a few months before June died. We’d brought her home from the hospital, same as Shaye and I had just done with Nash. June was finally back at her own house, the house with the past-tense florals and breakable, too-cherished belongings and the perfect draperies, draperies the children used to brush up against, making her wince. You had to be careful in there, that’s for sure. The house had grown too large for her, with its three empty bedrooms. Table surfaces and the tops of picture frames gathered dust. Something smelled musty. Thomas’s sister, Bailey, who wisely lived far enough away to be absolved of regular involvement, had flown in to be with her. As we were leaving, Bailey was making grilled cheese sandwiches in a frying pan with peeling Teflon. June chatted cheerfully from the couch. This was the illness attention she had always longed for, and in spite of how sick she was, her cheeks glowed with pleasure.

  In the car, though, I could see Thomas’s tight-jawed profile. Amy was in the backseat, talking about wanting to run a marathon. It was an involved plan, the sort of complicated idea that Melissa and Amy were fond of in their teen years; there would be training sessions, and new shoes, and a certain number of days before the big event, and friends who wanted to join in. Damn if she didn’t actually run that thing and finish, too. But right then her voice bubbled over my shoulder; she was saying something about strength and building endurance, and Thomas’s eyes, his usually warm and friendly eyes, got that coldness I was familiar with from when we argued.

  Two people can have a silent conversation when you’ve been together a long time. Maybe you’re wrong about who says what, but I doubt it. When we got home, he didn’t speak to me, and he yanked his arm from mine when I reached out.

  “Thomas?” I asked, as he changed into his old jeans and went outside and started the lawn mower. The lawn mower shouted. It told me what a disappointment I was. It told me that his mother would die soon, without him ever giving her what she wanted, what Bailey was right then giving her, some easy, doting care, free of undercurrents. It blamed me for the way our children were stiff and overpolite with June and for the way Amy right then cared more about her marathon than about his mother, and it even blamed me for the fact that June would be gone for good, as if I’d been a factor in her demise. The person next to you is the large mirror you look into, a mirror that reflects your own failings. Sometimes, that person is also a soft, easy target, an unknowing and ever-deficient receptacle for your expectations.

  The distant eyes stayed distant. Thomas left and a mood took his place. The mood had a place at the dinner table. At first I tried to tame it with kindness, and then I stepped around it when I encountered it in the hall. I let it have the first shower so it didn’t run out of hot water and tiptoed so as not to wake it. When June died, I stood beside Thomas and held his arm in that black suit, but he was truly off somewhere, standing alone. I hadn’t shared his love, and so I couldn’t share his loss, and he made sure not to meet my eyes to remind me of this.

  Yes. That’s when it had begun.

  And when had I stepped away from Thomas? Was it when I was so sick of the mood I could have held a pillow over its puffy, dark face? Was it when he merely patted my hand after Hugo’s own eyes had gone blank, just after he sighed his last breath? Or was it an accumulation of farther backs, times I felt despair and was met with his chirpy optimism? When he hadn’t seen me? When that chirpy optimism in the face of despair told me I wasn’t known? That’s all we want much of the time, to be seen and known.

  Or was he my own soft target, the one who hadn’t met my expectations? Maybe it went all the way back to that first meeting with his mother, and the times since, when he’d let her say and do to me whatever she wanted. Or to the times when I was the one to call the police because the teen boys next door were having a party so loud it woke the baby. Or when I was the one to confront a vicious coach, or the insurance company, or that nasty female accountant, because he couldn’t stand to be the bad guy. He couldn’t stand to be the bad guy, but when I called the police, or confronted the coach, or dealt with the accountant, or pushed away the spiteful mother, I was a person he disliked, and I knew it. I was a person he disapproved of, then. Maybe this went all the way back to that raccoon. To the thing I most longed for since Shaye and I were children, protection against a raging storm, something much too heavy to set upon Thomas’s very real shoulders.

  You hold a story about your husband or wife in your head—who they are and who they aren’t. What they have and haven’t done. The catalog of their wrongdoings. You want them to be this somebody who fills this something and they aren’t and can’t. It was all ancient fault lines, some with names, some without. Cracks and crevices you could barely see the bottom of, going on for miles. You could get so tired of that story. The wagon train could go over the cliff finally, and maybe it would be a relief, that last tin cup bouncing against the rocks before hitting bottom.

  “This is the life we have,” Thomas said. “This is the life we made.”

  “This is the life we’ve had so far,” I said.

  “I’m coming out there,” Thomas said.

  “I need some time alone. I need some self-care.”

  It sounded angrier than I felt.

  —

  “Tex, please!”

  I recognized the sound of that truck, too. I was glad Nash was napping in her room but dismayed at my own disheveled state. I’d only had a quick shower that morning, and my hair was up; I wore an old pair of shorts I often gardened in and a tank top with frayed seams. I think it might have once been Amy’s. I managed to locate my purse in a hurry before he rapped on the door, and I popped a white square of mint gum into my mouth.

  Kit Covey held out a gold-wrapped box of chocolates, and for a moment I thought it was old-fashioned courting. Flowers would be next, a nervous interview with the father I never had, but Kit set me straight. “We heard your aunt had been in the hospital,” he said. “A little something from all of us.”

  “P.R.,” I said.

  “No,” he said, and seemed to mean it.

  “Thank you.” I set the box on the table near the door. If Nash knew where those chocolates came from, she’d never touch them, but Shaye and I would. You’d better believe it.

  Kit looked around the room as if he was in a museum, which in a way he was. He tilted his head as he looked at the cuckoo clock. I followed his eyes and then his slid to mine and held. He cleared his throat. “I was wondering,” he said.

  My heart thumped around. I was nervous, because I felt the crackle between us, and because I could smell him, some warm outside smell mixed with skin and leather.

  “We’re done for the day, and there’s this place, about an hour from here. You might like to see it. If you haven’t already. That old resort, the Cal Neva?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Mmm, afraid not.”

  He smiled. “Oh, you’ll like this. Beautiful place, on the lake. Tahoe. Full of history. The first casino, way back in the thirties. The gangsters used to run it. Guys with names like Pretty Boy and Baby Face. Sinatra owned it in the early sixties. Think Rat Pack and Marilyn Monroe, and toss in a few Kennedys and haunted tunnels, gangsters, and crooners…”

  “Crooners—I’m in.”

  “I thought you might appreciate a different view of what it’s like out here. The topography…”

  “The topography.”

  He laughed.

  “A field trip,” I said.

  “Dinner, maybe?”

  “Great.” I wasn’t sure if it was great. Something inside apparently felt so, though, because this is what I answered without thinking. “After two days of hospital food, that sounds amazing. Let me make sure my sister’s got this under control.”

  Upstairs, Shaye’s arms were crossed and she was doing that great trick where she raised one eyebrow. I could never do that. “More like, does my sister have this under control,” she said.

  “You were listening.”

  “Of course I was listening.”

  “Well, then, of course I have this under control.”

  “For God’s sake, change your clothes,” she said. “And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “I won’t do anything you would do.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot.” She gave me a little shove. “Well, I guess if anyone needs to get Renovated, it’s you. But forest-service men, you know…Only YOU can prevent forest fires. Better hold on to your matches, sister.”

  —

  The highway from the ranch to Lake Tahoe climbed steadily up, up from the desert. Before I knew it, the terrain had changed drastically. We were high in the mountains, with views over the Washoe Valley, and then the vegetation changed again, becoming thick and green with tall pines on either side.

  “This is more like home,” I said. “All the trees. And mountains. I make fun of Seattle, with all its effortful outdoorsy-ness, but I love it there. It’s so beautiful, like this. Whenever I leave and come back, I’m always shocked by how beautiful. Water everywhere. Boats, seaplanes. Clean, clean air. You ever been?”

  “I was in Seattle maybe a year ago.” Kit flicked on his turn signal, checked the mirror, then passed a slow-moving RV, with a license-plate holder that said Captain Ed. “Giving a paper on ‘The Public Response to Designated Wilderness and Roadless Areas.’ Exciting, huh?”

  “Sorry I missed it.” I sort of was.

  “I saw the inside of the Hilton, which I could give you a narrated tour of someday, if you’d like.”

  “Let me guess. The Rainier Room, which opened to the Cascade Ballroom, something along those lines.”

  “That was about it.”

  “Well, the next time you come, I’ll show you around properly.” It was one of those things you say. I couldn’t imagine Kit Covey in my world, any more than I could imagine myself back home right then. We were there in his truck, and he shifted gears as the truck climbed, and it was everywhere else that felt imagined. His fingers tapping the steering wheel—they felt real, and so did his profile as he drove.

  “It even smells more like home here,” I said.

  “Smells like green.”

  It did smell like green, and as we got closer to the lake and you could see the solemn, snowy peaks of the Sierras and the lake itself in the deep basin, it smelled like white and then blue.

  We walked under the welcoming awning of the Cal Neva Resort and opened the doors of the main building, with its Alpine-chalet, high-peaked roof. The place was empty; it looked closed, but we could still get in. The Indian Room was locked, so we peeked inside. It had log walls and wagon-wheel chandeliers, elk heads and hides on the walls. I imagined mobsters and mistresses, the blare of saxophones, glasses clinking, and the kind of swagger and glamour that’d been long gone, replaced with us pecking at our phones in athletic attire.

  Outside, Kit pointed to the small cabins on a ridge. Number three was where Marilyn slept, he said, likely with Kennedys, plural. Number five was Sinatra’s. They looked smaller than you’d think. Not too different from the cabins at Tamarosa, although when we looked in, there were shiny gold bedspreads and wicker chairs. I expected larger and grander, though I guess in those days things were both grander and smaller. We have closets the size of bedrooms now, but they’re absent of satin and crinoline.

  “Ghosts,” I said.

  “Everywhere,” Kit said.

  “Look how beautiful.” The lake was a glassy mirror reflecting mountains and trees and the resort itself, turned liquid. I wished my girls could see it. We had plenty of gorgeous lakes in the Northwest; right in the city itself there were four, two very large ones. Lake Washington was stunning, with its large, tech-bought houses hugging the bank and fresh, deep aquamarines, and Lake Union was a quirky cornucopia of floating homes and seaplanes and sailboats. But this huge lake looked almost eerie and cold and even mystical, maybe because I could feel the history there. I could sense the ghosts of movie stars and gamblers and the FBI, betrayers in cement shoes.

  “Beautiful,” Kit said. He grinned and squeezed my arm. “You, too. You are.”

  It was a casual, easy compliment, devoid of deep import. It seemed merely refreshingly sincere, and so I smiled. “It’s the good air and good company,” I said. But I felt beautiful, even in my hurried-on sundress and hair pulled from its ponytail. I felt young, and light, and myself. And Kit—he matched the place; he fit. Even in his jeans and T-shirt, he had an air about him, something lasting. Maybe he was another person who had always been old.

  “The sky’s as amazing as the water,” I said. It was dotted with white quotation-mark clouds.

  “I could watch a sky like a movie,” he said. “But that water makes me want to be in that water.”

  We walked and explored until hunger hit. At the Crystal Bay Café, we ordered steaks and baked potatoes, which arrived wrapped in tinfoil. It was another thing to love about this place—at home, food was soy-filled, gluten-free, everything-free; here, people ate gravy and enjoyed it. Evening fell. A country-western band was playing. A woman in a hip-hugging black dress and cowboy boots sang into a microphone, as if she’d loved that thing her whole life long. A few people were dancing. We were now on our second time in a bar with a band. Things had changed since our first, and I don’t even know how it happened. Change was sneaky like that.

  Kit pushed his plate away. He tipped the last of his drink down his throat, grabbed my hand, and I went with him. It was a slow song, and his cheek was next to mine. He smelled like alcohol and warm skin and our mouths were close. I wanted him bad then, I admit it. His shirt was soft where I touched his shoulder. It was the shortest song ever, and we parted and applauded the singer. She bent her head forward in a bow, and her dark hair fell down straight over her face. I wondered whom she went home to—maybe the drummer, with his aviator glasses and wild hair and wet rings under the arms of his black shirt.

  “You’re a dancer after all,” he said.

  “I was going to say the same thing about you,” I said.

  “Only in the delirium of high altitude.”

  I insisted on splitting the bill, a gesture Shaye would surely mock. Still, I knew what this was and wasn’t and would never be. Outside, the air had grown cold and crisp; it was the kind you want to take a bite out of. The night had fallen in earnest, and small points of light had begun to twinkle around us. By the time we’d started down the mountain, night had gotten serious, and the curves felt treacherous.

  “It’s all right,” Kit said. He looked over at me, but I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road. “I’ve got it. I know this road.”

  “Ah, that obvious?”

  “It was these.” He loosened my fingers from the seat edge. You can hold so much tension in your body and not even realize it, until you roll your neck or take a deep breath and suddenly it’s as if the wrongly accused prisoner has made his joyous escape.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “It implies something. About your capability. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I know that. No offense taken.”

  “Well, good.”

  “I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

  He glanced at me again and grinned. He did know that road. His own shoulders were easy and his face relaxed. I wanted that drive to last and last after that. Even on those dark and twisty roads, I could have driven all night and into the next day and the next, but we were back at the ranch so fast. Time is so mean, the way it quickens and slows opposite to your desires. I suppose if your only task were to stretch on to infinity, you’d need to play some games, too, but how cruel.

  We arrived. Kit turned off the truck, and I could hear crickets. There was that same dilapidated fence and the empty pool and the tractor, which Shaye had abandoned in the driveway, but now Nash’s new car sat shiny in the light of the moon. “This was a treat,” Kit said.

  “It was. Thank you.”

  “Thank you. I needed that, I’ll tell you that much.”

  I leaned in to hug him goodbye and our cheeks set against each other again. I shut my eyes, took in his smell and his warm skin. “Ahh,” he said, as we separated. I opened my door and got out. Leaned in through the window.

  “Thank you again,” I said.

  “My pleasure, ma’am. Truly.”

  The ground slid under my feet. The earth cracked open and left a gash, and I had no idea how deep it was or for how many miles it went.

  I was startled when I opened the front door. Nash and Shaye were both up late, sitting in the living room, which was dark except for the light of that stereo. Dr. Yabba Yabba Love’s molasses-and-ginger voice poured from it. Every apple’s got its seeds. Nash’s feet were up on the sofa. She was still wearing those socks with the nubs on the bottom they gave her in the hospital.

  “Eric bought plane tickets. He’s taking the girls on a cruise,” Shaye said. Even in the dim light, I could see that her face was puffy from crying.

  I had barely set my purse down before Nash spoke, too.

  “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that love is complicated. But, Callie…”

  I’d disappointed her, but I wasn’t sure I cared. I’d spent too much of my life not disappointing people. “What, Nash?”

  “When the horses are gathered…I’ve seen it. Terrible, life-altering things can happen.”