“Em,” he said. He tossed the cigarette and began to pat the old man on the back, unprepared for the slightness of him under the coat, the racking thin basket of ribs and spine. “You need water,” he said, and Emmet shook his head and raised the travel mug, or attempted to—black gouts of coffee leaping from the sip hole before Grant reached to stabilize it, guiding it to the gray, contorted face. Emmet sipped, swallowed, sipped again. Grant let go of the mug and sat back again.

“Lord,” Emmet gasped, wiping at his chin. “Holy mother,” he said.

When the old man was quiet again, and a long moment beyond that, Grant leaned forward and said, “Want to say I’m sorry, Em. About last night. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Emmet reached up and reseated the red cap, tugging it forward and down, as a man facing a gale might.

“I told him it was time for him to go,” he said.

“When?”

“Last night, after you left.”

“What did he say?”

“Don’t matter what he said.”

“I’m sorry about that, Em.”

“Don’t be.” He looked over at the rose stone. “Alice,” he said, and stopped. He shifted on the bench. “She’d tell you the same thing.”

Grant rubbed at his fingers, at the two knuckles that were now the tips, nailless and printless and bone hard under the skin; yet still sometimes when he reached for a coffee cup or to scratch his jaw, he would experience again as if for the first time the bewildering moment when fingers that had been there, indisputably, suddenly were not. The loss that was more than physical.

Emmet said: “I know I never said it, and I guess I should of. But that’s your home as long as you want it, Grant. You and Sean both.”

“I appreciate that, Emmet. I can’t even tell you.”

“But you’re leaving just the same. Ain’t you.”

Grant said nothing.

“And just where are you gonna go?” the old man nearly demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“Back to Wisconsin?”

“I don’t know.” Grant stared at his hands. “I haven’t taken very good care of that boy. If he got in his head to just leave again . . .”

There was movement and they both turned to see a pair of cardinals, males both, sitting bright red in the ribs of a birch. Beyond the birch was the rose headstone, the only one not snowcapped. Grant had seen the chiseled words but not read them. They named the woman whose remains lay there, ALICE MARGARET KINNEY, with her dates, and they named the man who sat beside him on the bench, EMMET THOMAS KINNEY, for whom there were no dates, for whom the stone carver waited, and below these were the words MAN AND WIFE and nothing more. The face of his own wife came to him then, Angela Mary Courtland, and a time of graves he could not imagine.

He turned back and Emmet was watching him.

“What?” Grant said.

The old man looked away and shook his head. “Leaving’s hard,” he said. “But it ain’t the hardest thing. Is it.”

48

The boy walked the mares to the front pasture, released them, and walked back to the barn, passing the El Camino coming and going; his blood on the windshield was long gone and there was no other sign of that day but the caved-in door where Billy had kicked it.

Some cowboy, Dudley. Some Marlboro man.

In the barn he picked up the rake and began to muck the stalls. A black farm cat gathered herself and flew up to one of the saddles and sat there, tracking the flights of swallows in the dusty heights.

Two Saturdays gone by and now a third and he knew she wouldn’t come and he knew he would have to go to her, but what would he say if he did? And what did it matter anyway?

Th en why don’t you stop thinking about it?

About it?

Her.

He was hindered by the cast but not as hindered as he had been, and before long he removed his jacket and continued working in his T-shirt, and this was how his father found him, planted in a dry blizzard of dust and straw, bending and forking and pitching the soiled straw into the wheelbarrow.

“Sean,” he said, and without stopping the boy said, “What.”

Then he stopped and turned and saw his father standing in the bay door.

It was the first day of April, a bright day with the smell of spring in it. She’d been gone for two years and eight months.

The deputy met them at the interstate and they followed his silver SUV down toward Denver, and they exited where he exited and followed him up again, climbing the pass toward Estes Park and Boulder. Spring had come indisputably to this county and the tires hissed as they struck the dark bands of thaw that lay across the road. The high bends of blacktop as they took them ignited in waves of granular light, starfields of quartz and mica, and they saw in memory the black dazzle of the cinder track in the spring—the brilliance of the white lines on the oily black, her long-striding legs scissoring between the lines as she neatly snipped one girl, and another, and then another

from the picture. The gleam and heat and sun-smell of her after. The other girls, their parents, stepping into their circle of happiness, circle of pride, congratulating and stepping away again.

There was no other sound in the cab but the rushing wind at their windows, and watching these new trees in this new county, the deep gorges and the far piney walls, they remembered the first time they’d climbed such a road and it could have been the same road, same mountain, a family from the plains who’d never seen such country before. And if the country was no longer strange to them, it was still strange in that it had never again astounded them, nor awed nor excited them again, but only reminded them every day and almost from hour to hour what it had taken from them and what it had made of them. The deputy’s signal winked and his taillights flared and he veered from the blacktop onto a sudden unpaved road, a narrow passage where such sunlight as reached their windshields, their faces, was green and trembling and heatless. The deputy’s SUV and the Chevy after it yawing and pitching in the graveled wallows until the road summitted and fed them down into a bowl of cleared land where four other cars sat waiting. Two of these were official SUVs like the one they followed and two were the meaningless parked cars of hikers.

Sheriff Kinney and his other young deputy stepped from the silver cruiser and moved toward Grant and the boy who were coming to meet the lawmen in the middle ground. Gravel and needles and deadfall crushing under their boots. The sheriff stopped and his deputies stopped and stood behind him, their young faces grave. He reached to shake Grant’s hand as he always did and then put his hands on his belt and regarded the boy.

“What happened to you?”

The boy looked at the cast on his wrist, as if he’d not been aware of it. He’d worn it for three weeks now and it showed the dirt of that time and could not be cleaned. He said he’d fallen off a horse.

“The hell you say. One of ours?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why wasn’t I told?”

“It wasn’t the horse’s fault,” said the boy.

“Don’t make no difference.” The sheriff studied him. He adjusted his hat and looked at Grant, and he remembered why he was there.

“You sure you all want to do this?” he said, and Grant looked up from the gravel.

“What else can we do?”

“You can wait down below.”

“Up here or down there, we have to look,” he said. “Don’t we, Joe.”

“That’s why I called you,” said the sheriff. “Though I shouldn’t of. I should of done it by the book and called you later. But it’s likely to be hours yet before we even get this”—he hesitated—“recovery under way.”

“I’m grateful you called, Joe.”

The way he figured it, said the sheriff, the perp had driven her up here