Table of Contents
MORE FICTION FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS
Also by Laura Pritchett
Hell’s Bottom, Colorado
for Jake and Eliana,
with love
PROLOGUE
That pickup is a piece of junk. Three different shades of white and roaring like the muffler was never part of the deal. But Tess, she’s beautiful. Leaning out the passenger-side window, blowing kisses from her palm, her dark eyes dancing like they’ve finally decided to come alive again. “Goodbye, Libby, goodbye!” she’s singing at me.
As if that pickup and man are going to get her somewhere. As if she’s not leaving anything behind. As if she don’t see me crying.
She smiles, she waves. As if this is the happy farewell she’s been dreaming of.
Her dark hair is giving her trouble, shifting sideways from the breeze, and she has to stop waving long enough to catch up the shiny-dark strands with both hands, and something about that makes her laugh, and with her laugh everything starts to change. The truck roars louder and the gravel snaps as the tires start moving. Her hair flies from her hands again, her body leans farther from the window, and her goodbyes get louder.
I step forward. Bits of hay dust from the bed of the truck blow in my face, and the sun’s setting behind her, and no matter how hard I squint, I can’t see. Then she’s gone. Just like that. And I’m still standing there, looking at the place where she just disappeared.
What’s left is this: a couple of cows and a barbed-wire fence and pale grassland stretching on to meet the faint outline of mountains in the distance. The sky’s streaked with pink and orange where the sun’s getting low over those mountains, but by the time the arc of sky gets to me, it’s a dark evening blue. A meadowlark’s singing and there’s the distant sound of pigs slamming the covers of their feeders, but all in all, it’s pretty quiet until Amber starts crying.
This kid is cradled in the crook of my arm, looking past me and into the sky with foggy blue-gray eyes. One red arm wobbles in the air, the fist clenched tight, and from her mouth shoots a raspy wail, way too big for that newborn body.
A word comes out of me too, a breath of a word: “Please.” It’s the word that’s been rising in my mind this whole time: Please, goddamn, please.
Please don’t go.
Please change that look in your eyes.
Please look at Amber.
I stare at the space where my sister just was, and I realize that she was acting like, Hey, ain’t-this-a-sweet-farewell? But underneath, the eyes were saying something else altogether: Keep your promise. Leave me alone.
I cover my mouth, sink down till my knees touch rocks, and bend over the baby, and I’m crying like crazy. Because that’s when I know that my sister is leaving, and that she doesn’t want this baby of hers that I’m holding in my arms.
ONE
It’s true: Every house has a few places that reach out and hold you. Standing spots, Kay calls them, and she says every home has one or two. That’s why I always find myself leaning against the frame of the kitchen door and looking east, toward the alfalfa field that comes up a stone’s throw from our door. In the summer, at least, that’s where I stand, sometimes with my one-cigarette-of-the-day, looking out over the leafy alfalfa in its various stages of growing. Besides that green field and the stretch of blue sky, the only other thing in view is the circle of buildings and cottonwoods that make up Baxter’s place in the distance. And the rutted dirt road that runs along the edge of the alfalfa, the one that connects our two houses.
Up close is the shed and burn barrel and Kay’s car that doesn’t run any more, and Kay’s other car that hasn’t run in so long that yellow-flowered weeds are growing out of it. There’s a concrete birdbath that we once used for cigarette butts, but it fell over in a windstorm a year or so ago and nobody’s picked it up yet. I’m quitting anyway and Kay mostly does her smoking over at Baxter’s, so now it makes a nice little step for me to put my foot on.
Next to the birdbath is a line of wilty-looking yellow marigolds. Who knows why I put them in. I think it was my attempt to make this place seem a little more—I don’t know, hospitable or something. I planted them when Tess was at the hospital in Lamar giving birth. I also put up blue streamers because all along we’d thought the baby was going to be a boy and I’d bought the roll in advance. But the tagboard sign I did in pink letters: WELCOME HOME TESS AND BABY AMBER!
The sign and streamers