“In July, when the wildflowers peaked, we all hiked up to Engineer Meadow, and the flowers were more spectacular than they’d been in years. I showed my grandchildren how to identify the blooms. We even picked a bouquet for their mother.
“The evenings were best. After the kids had gone down, we’d have dinner on the back porch. Candles, wine, lots of laughter, watching the alpenglow fade out on the Needles, and then came the stars, and you couldn’t believe how many there were, and there was no bad history, no pain, and, Abby, you looked at me across the table like I was someone you loved.
“I came out of this vision or dream, whatever you wanna call it, overcome by a devastating emptiness, a sense of total loss. I’ve lived alone in Durango, in a two-bedroom Victorian on Third Avenue, going on twenty years now. I don’t have close friends. There are acquaintances, a brother I talk to on the phone once a year on Christmas morning. Occasional dates, but no real love life. My work’s been my life and love. I’ve demanded absolute freedom, lived on my terms, and I . . .” His eyes were welling up. “I’m just now, at fifty-two years old, beginning to understand what the price of my freedom is. And it’s this. I’ll never have a summer like that one I imagined a few days ago.”
The fire roared now, its heat thawing Abigail’s face, causing an itchy burn in her left cheek. “Lawrence,” she said, “that’s a real sad story. But there’s something you’re missing, and maybe if you figured it out, you might be on your way to changing some things.”
“What am I missing, Abby?”
She looked at his purple right eye, the line of dried blood cracking down his cheek like old plaster. “It’s still all about you. What
“Abby, you have to know that—”
“And that in some deep and broken part of me, I still believe that? You left us. Mom never married. Practically holed herself up in that house for years, thinking you’d come back. Maybe if I’d had a brother or a sister, it wouldn’t have been so god-awful lonely. When I got into Columbia, you know she had to come to New York with me? ’Cause I couldn’t leave her in Baltimore? ’Cause she had nothing? No one? I didn’t spend college in a dorm. I lived with my mother in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, through two suicide attempts, three commitments, every second spent studying or working so we could eat, so we’d have heat in the winter, waking up, middle of the night sometimes, hearing her talking in the dark as I stood at her door, realizing it was you she was talking to, like you were lying in bed with her. Like you loved her. Even speaking for you. Do you know what that’s like? To hear your mother re- enacting the first time you two met? Fantasizing about a man who’d left her twenty years ago? Look, Mom’s better now, and I’m a big girl, got my own life. This isn’t about me crying for the daddy I never had. But I wish you could’ve been there with me, just one of those nights, seen what you turned her into.”
Lawrence drew back. He got up and walked over to the empty window frame. Several rocking chairs creaked out on the back porch, pushed by the wind. Lawrence looked back at his daughter. Abigail stared up at her father. She wanted to see his face streaked with firelit tears. Wanted to catch just a glimmer of self-loathing or shame in her father’s eyes, though it wouldn’t have changed much. But it might’ve been a start.
Lawrence had gone hard. He scowled, as if deeply offended, and in the light of the flames, his face appeared faintly grotesque and very old.
1893
FORTY-TWO
O
atha Wallace walked into the saloon without bothering to shed his oilskin slicker or knock the snow from his stovepipe boots, tracking great clumps of ice and powder as he crossed the board floor. Lana Hartman sat at the piano, working quietly through the first movement of Beethoven’s
The young deputy still snored in drunken bliss beside the stove, wrapped in a bearskin robe, a spittoon between his legs.
“First rattle out a the box with some irrigation,” Oatha said.
Joss set up a tumbler and a glass of beer as he reached the bar.
“What are you doin here?” she whispered. “Thought you wasn’t comin back ’til tomorrow.”
“There was a big goddamn spoke in the wheel.”
“What?”
“Unexpected company up at the Sawblade. We was followed by Ezekiel Curtice and that doctor.”
“Russ Ilg?”
“Didn’t catch the man’s name, but we had quite a scrape. Billy shot ’em both, and that makes seven dead in less than a day. We need to quit the flats right now, while the gate’s open.”
Joss took out her makings, rolled a cigarette, pulled a punk from her prayer book—just a sulfur-tipped splinter of wood. She lifted her shirt, struck the match against the middle button of her canvas trousers, then lit the quirly, smoke ascending into the bleary light of the kerosene lamp above the bar. Oatha took up the glass and drank, chased it.
“He’s fair sobered,” Joss whispered, motioning to the deputy. “Wasn’t gonna get him really stewed ’til tomorrow, like we discussed.”
“You got that big bowie under the bar? One you almost shoved through my ear this mornin?”
Joss grinned, blew a stream of smoke into his face.
“That should get the job done.”
“What about . . .” Joss cocked her head toward Lana.
