“What am I?” Red asked quietly.

Convenient was the adjective that popped into Jody’s head but which she didn’t say aloud. He was that, along with being the only available male for miles around who wasn’t a child or a grandfather. Or a relative. She glanced back at her current lover-not-boyfriend, at his wiry cowboy self sprawled across her sheets. Her fingers knew that his long frame was checkered and slashed with scars, bruises, odd bumps where bones had healed awkwardly, and fresh little wounds. Red wasn’t the most careful of cowboys. He tended to get bucked, bounced, and “rode over” more than your average rodeo rider, and he wasn’t even one of those anymore, he was just an ordinary ranch hand. Maybe that’s why she liked him, she sometimes thought, because that’s all and everything Red was-just a cowboy, with no pretense of anything else, or more. It was also true that other men’s bodies-the bodies of accountants, for instance, or lawyers, not that she’d ever been with such and really knew-were boring to her compared to the interesting terrain of cowboy skin.

“Well?” he challenged her.

She gave him an exasperated look-because the question irritated her and she couldn’t think of any answer that was true without also being hurtful. She turned her bare back on him, returning her attention to the disturbing view from her window, hiding her naked self behind the new white eyelet curtains. The hot breeze coming through the open window blew dangerously around her, threatening to expose her nakedness to the street and to any uncle who happened to look up.

Jody sucked in her upper lip and held it between her teeth.

Red had sucked on a breath mint after lunch at the Rose Café, right before slipping into her house, her bedroom, and her. She could still taste peppermint in her own mouth, along with a tangy hint of hot sauce and an even tangier taste of him. She could still feel his callused touch on her skin, too, a feeling so real she would have sworn his rough hands had followed her to the window. They were not sensations she wanted to have with her uncles arriving.

They were also not activities the local high school had looked for on her résumé when they hired her to be their new English teacher in two and a half months. She had whooped with joy upon landing that job, but immediately tamped down her exuberance, because who knew how long she could stay employed in such an iffy economy? And what if she wasn’t a good teacher, or the kids hated her, or their parents objected to Catcher in the Rye? There were so many things that could go wrong after something went right.

Tense as fresh-strung barbed wire, she watched from the second floor.

Three truck doors slammed, bang, bang, bang, with the solid thud of well-built vehicles. Now her uncles were walking toward each other. What were they doing here, and why didn’t she know anything about it? Uncle Chase was supposed to be in Colorado, running the family’s ranch on the high plains east of the Rockies; Uncle Bobby was supposed to be in Nebraska, where he ran a third ranch the family owned, in the Sand Hills. Uncle Meryl was supposed to be at his law office in Henderson City, the county seat, twenty-five miles away.

“Hey,” Red said, in the tone of a man feeling ignored.

“Shh!”

From her hidden vantage point, she watched with growing alarm.

Now her uncles were meeting in a tall, wide-shouldered trio on the sidewalk in front of her porch, and now her uncle Chase was grinding out a cigarette on the cement, and now he picked it up and put it in his shirt pocket-not because he was so thoughtful, but because every rancher and farmer was wary of fire. And now her uncles were coming toward her front door together-big men dressed in cowboy boots, pressed pants, cotton shirts, and wearing their best straw cowboy hats for summer. The hats, alone, were a disturbing sign. The uncles usually wore their best hats only to weddings, funerals, and cattlemen conventions, preferring brimmed caps for everyday. Meryl even wore a bolo tie and one of the hideous plaid suit coats that her aunt Belle had never been able to excise from his wardrobe. He had matched it with a reddish-brown pair of polyester trousers that made Jody, even two stories up, wrinkle her nose. She knew what Meryl would say if she mocked his wardrobe: he’d say it fooled out-of-town lawyers into mistaking him for a bumpkin-to their sorrow and his clients’ gain.

Their trucks also looked suspiciously clean, as for making formal calls.

They wouldn’t have done all this for just any casual visit.

When her uncles went formal-visiting, they showered first and changed into clean clothes. Jody’s grandmother, who was the mother of two of these men and a near-mother to the third one, wouldn’t stand for any less. If a male in Jody’s family stepped into somebody’s house, he would, by God, smell of soap. Her uncle Bobby might be forty-one years old, her uncle Chase might be forty-four, and Uncle Meryl might be forty-six and have married into the family instead of being born into it, but they lived by the laws that all Linders lived by, the commandments that Jody’s grandparents, Hugh Senior and Annabelle Linder, set down. You didn’t show up in church dirty and smelling of horse. You didn’t take your cow-shitty work boots into other people’s nice living rooms. Most important of all, you didn’t show up at somebody’s house without calling ahead first, even if that somebody was only your niece.

They hadn’t called first. She hadn’t known they were coming.

And then they really scared her, because they rang her doorbell.

Only after that unprecedented announcement of their arrival did she hear her front door open, and a moment later her uncle Chase called out in his smoky baritone, “Josephus?”

It wasn’t her name, which was Laurie Jo, after her mother.

Joe-see-fuss was her three uncles’ nickname for her.

She clutched a fist to her naked breasts: had something happened at the ranch?

Was it her grandfather Hugh Senior, was it her grandmother Annabelle?

She didn’t know what she would do without either of them; they had been the rocks of her life since her parents had gone.

“Jody?” Chase called, louder this time. “Honey? You home?”

He sounded tense, which wasn’t like her coolest uncle.

In a flash Jody thought of their various wives and ex-wives, their assorted children and stepchildren who were her cousins and sort-of cousins. There were so many disasters that could happen on a cattle outfit. So many ways to get hurt, so many ways to end up in hospitals or funeral homes, so many ways to break hearts and families. She couldn’t think of any minor calamities that would prompt her uncles to pay a special visit like this to her. They wouldn’t do this unless there was something serious, something they couldn’t just make a phone call to tell her, and worse-something that made them decide they had to tell her en masse.

“Jesus,” she whispered, a half prayer, hurrying to pick up clothes to cover her naked body. She felt shocked, albeit without being surprised at all, since she believed that bad events followed good as inevitably as death followed life, and as frequently. The secret, she had decided when she was younger, was to try to anticipate it, so as to mitigate the blow. The problem with that philosophy was that it never worked; she was always surprised; no matter how far ahead she tried to look, bad news still hurt, shock still left her shaken. With a start, she realized she hadn’t answered, so she yelled in a high voice, “I’m home, Uncle Chase! I’m upstairs, I’ll be right there!”

“You want us to come up?” he yelled back.

“No!” she screamed. God, no.

On the bed, Red had bolted up to a sitting position at the first sound of that voice, which was the voice of one of the members of his extended family of employers. He also heard the terrifying offer to climb the stairs, and now he was trying to scurry out of bed and get dressed fast and silently.