Chapter 1: The House on the Wash
Evie Marsh took her coffee on the porch at five-thirty, the way she had for fifty-eight years, because the desert at dawn was the one part of the day that still told the truth. The sky over Juniper Flats went from plum to copper in the time it took the kettle to boil, and the heat, when it came, would come honest. She sat in her chair. Walter's chair sat beside hers, empty, holding the shape of him the way a good chair does, and she did not make a ceremony of it. She just drank her coffee next to it, the way you sit next to anybody you've known that long.
The house behind her was eighty-one years old too, and wearing it worse. It had been a fine ranch house once, thick-walled against the summer, with a porch that ran the whole front and a carport Walter had framed himself in the winter of '79. Now the paint had gone the color of old newspaper. The roof over the kitchen carried a stain the size of a bedsheet, brown at the edges, from the leak she had been promising herself about since March. The well pump, when she ran the tap, cleared its throat three times before it agreed to work, like a man deciding whether to answer a question.
She was, by her own account, managing.
Managing meant the garden still got watered, a third of an acre of stubborn tomatoes and chiles behind wire against the rabbits. Managing meant the truck started, mostly, and the bills that mattered most got paid in a worked-out order โ electric, propane, insurance on the truck, groceries โ and the ones that couldn't be paid yet went into the cookie tin on top of the refrigerator, where she didn't have to look at them while she cooked.
The cookie tin had been Walter's mother's. It had roosters on it, faded to ghosts. Evie reached it down most mornings the way you press a sore tooth with your tongue, just to confirm it still hurt the same amount.
This morning she didn't reach for it. The sky was too fine, copper going to gold over the flats, the mesquite along the wash standing black against it. She could afford one morning of not pressing the tooth.
Below the porch the land ran out flat and pale to the wash โ a dry scar of sand and cobble a quarter mile wide that Walter had called the river that only showed up to arguments. Beyond it, the state route shimmered east toward town and west toward the interstate, and beyond that the mountains stood in their layers, blue on blue.
On the day's list: feed the dog, check the pump house, move the sprinkler, mend the gate hinge that sang. None of it required another person. That was the design of the days now, and she had built it on purpose.
At seven Hank Breslin's old Ford came up the drive in no hurry at all, the way it had come up her drive three mornings a week since Walter died, and he got out with a sack of grapefruit from his tree and the news of town arranged in the order he thought she'd want it. Hank was seventy-eight, retired off a ranch twice the size of hers, widowed longer than she had been, and he had appointed himself โ without ever saying so, which she appreciated โ the second set of eyes on the place.
"Pump still clearing its throat?" he said.
"It has opinions," Evie said. "Coffee's on."
He took Walter's chair without asking, which was the arrangement, and which had taken him a full year to manage without apologizing first. They drank. He told her the county grader had finally done the wash crossing, that the sky over the western peaks had a look to it by afternoon yesterday that he did not care for. Monsoon season. The storms would start stacking up over the mountains and rolling down onto the flats the way they always did, sudden and total, turning the dry wash into a brown river in the time it took to say so.
"I'll batten down when there's something to batten," Evie said.
"You'll holler if the roofโ"
"The roof has been going to fall in for three years, Hank. It's a considerate roof. It'll warn me."
He let it go, the way he let most of it go, and when he left he took the long way past the pump house, listening. She watched his taillights take the wash road and felt the quiet come back over the yard like water filling a footprint.
Managing, Evie thought, and went in to wash her cup. Managing was a word that meant she wasn't, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so, because in this country you let a person keep their word for a thing as long as they could lift it.