a funeral service outdoors, at noon, in the height of summer? All around, the air shimmered with a dry, painful heat, all wind and dust and cracked earth. The kind of heat that made your throat hurt and your skin prickle with the whispered threat of fire. This was desert heat. Only they weren’t in the desert. They were in Paradise Valley, California, at the Praeger ranch, an oasis of lush green pastureland. Or at least it had been, before the drought arrived, drying out the river beds and turning the meadows brown and brittle, like an old man’s skin.
‘As we gather to scatter Mimi’s ashes over the land she loved …’ The pastor took a sip of water, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, his face tomato-red. ‘Let us call to mind our own failings …’
Jim Newsome tuned out. The rancher’s failings were his own business, not some milksop of a preacher’s, barely out of short pants. Jim would call them to mind when he was good and ready.
Instead, he scanned the faces of the mourners gathered outside old Mimi Praeger’s cabin, a simple, pine post-and-beam structure that belonged to another era, another time. More than thirty people had shown up for the service, a good number, especially when you considered how much Mimi had always kept to herself. For years she’d lived totally alone up here, miles from the nearest gas station, and a full day’s walk to the tiny convenience store on Prospect Road. Then the child had come along – Ella – and for a few years it had been the two of them, grandmother and granddaughter, like a pair of pioneer women against the world. But children grow. When Ella finally left the cabin for college in San Francisco, it had just about broken poor Mimi’s heart.
A lot of people never forgave the girl for that.
‘She’s got a nerve showing her face here, if you ask me,’ Jim’s wife Mary had observed caustically, watching Ella Praeger talking to the preacher before today’s service. In a fitted black shift dress and patent leather boots, and with her long blonde hair tied back severely in a single, too-tight braid, Mimi’s granddaughter had certainly come a long way from the scruffy, oddball tomboy kid the locals remembered.
‘She could hardly not come,’ replied Jim. ‘She’s family, after all. Next of kin. And this is her land now.’
‘Not for long,’ Mary Newsome sniffed. ‘You think she’s going to want to hold on to this place, now she has her fancy-pants city life? She’ll sell just as soon as she gets an offer, you mark my words.’
‘Maybe,’ said Jim.
Jim Newsome couldn’t find it in his heart to judge Ella Praeger as severely as his wife – or the rest of the valley, for that matter. It must have been tough growing up out here, with only old Mimi for company. Both parents dead. No TV. No friends. No fun. Little wonder the girl had turned out strange. Withdrawn. Brittle. That kind of loneliness wasn’t healthy for a young person. Or any person, for that matter.
Ella Praeger took the urn from the preacher’s clammy hands and solemnly carried it to the foot of the oak tree. Her grandmother had loved this tree. Ella would watch her stroking it sometimes, running a gnarled hand up and down its ancient bark affectionately, as if it were a pet dog.
It got more affection than she ever showed me, Ella thought. But she wasn’t bitter. Mimi Praeger was who she was: a survivalist and a loner who had chosen a life completely at one with the land. She had taught Ella the things she knew. How to chop down a tree, how to fix a roof and build a boat, how to start a fire and shoot a rabbit and gut a fish and clean a gun. She had tried to teach her how to pray. Ella knew that her grandmother had loved her, in her own reserved, uncommunicative way. She had done her best to raise her dead son’s only child, a burden she never asked for.
When Ella was eleven, a woman had come to the cabin – she was from social services, Ella now realized, although back then nothing was explained – and after the woman’s visit, Mimi had reluctantly allowed Ella to attend school in the nearest town. It was a two-hour journey, there and back, involving three buses and one long walk along a frightening, unlit road, and it was Ella’s first experience of life outside of the ranch. Of television and internet, of different clothes and cars, of pop music and fast-food restaurants and people. So many people. Ella observed all of it with a sort of detached wonder, like a visitor on a day trip to an exotic zoo. But while she excelled academically at Valley High, socially she never fit in. Never tried to fit in, her teachers believed. Ella brought home reports with words like ‘aloof’ and ‘arrogant’ mingled in with other, less damning adjectives. Gifted. Exceptional. Her language skills in particular were extraordinary, including a pronounced talent for computer languages, the newly voguish ‘coding’ that was becoming so highly prized by California colleges.
Unfortunately Ella’s grandmother did not approve of computer science, for reasons that again were never explained to Ella, and those classes were dropped. But Ella’s GPA remained stellar, even as her struggles with social skills intensified. Ostracized by her peers at school, for her old-fashioned clothes and standoffish manner – (with the exception of the boys who flocked to sleep with her, delighted by Ella’s matter-of-fact promiscuity once she hit puberty and her complete disregard for the concept of ‘reputation’, so important to the other high school girls) – Ella’s isolation intensified. She lived in two worlds – the world of school and the world of Mimi’s ranch – but didn’t fit in to either of them.
Mimi’s horror when Ella accepted a place at Berkeley took Ella by surprise. She’d assumed her grandmother would be happy and proud of her achievement, but once again she seemed to have missed those all-important signals.
‘But I thought you wanted me to go to college?’ Ella said imploringly.
‘What on earth made you think that?’ her grandmother wailed. ‘You can’t go to the city, Ella. I need you here.’
‘But … you always encouraged me to study.’
‘Not so you would leave! After everything I’ve done for you, Ella.’
‘What for, then?’
‘For yourself!’ Mimi banged a veiny fist on the simple kitchen table that the two women had eaten on every day for the last thirteen years. ‘To fulfill your God-given potential. Not so that you could run off to one of those dreadful, godless colleges and expose yourself to … to …’
‘To what, Granny?’ Ella had shouted back, in a rare loss of temper. ‘To life?’
‘To danger,’ the old woman replied, shaking a finger at Ella. ‘Danger.’
Feeling the clay urn in her hands, that conversation came back to Ella as though it were yesterday. What ‘danger’ had her grandmother been so afraid of on her behalf? What fate in the city could possibly be worse than the slow death by suffocation of life up here on the ranch, in the middle of nowhere? Especially these last few years, when it didn’t even rain. Even God, it seemed, had abandoned them.
Turning around just once to look at the group of mourners assembled on the hillside, Ella wondered what these people were doing here. Most of them she recognized vaguely as the owners of neighboring ranches, or faces from church or the store. But not one of them really knew Mimi, or her. They weren’t friends. Ella’s grandmother didn’t ‘do’ friends. Perhaps as a result, Ella had never acquired the skill of getting people to like her, of forging bonds of affection the way that other people seemed to do so effortlessly. Instead, like Mimi, she tended to say exactly what she thought, blurting out observations or responding to questions with a blunt honesty that frequently landed her in trouble.
There was one man among the mourners whom Ella didn’t recognize, standing at the very back in a dark suit and mirrored sunglasses. Other than Ella herself, he was the only person present in ‘city’ clothes, and he looked as out of place among these simple, farming folk as a unicorn in a cowshed. He was tall and slim, and when he took the sunglasses off, Ella could see that he had a classically handsome face, like a model from a men’s clothing catalog. Strong jaw. Tanned skin. She wondered briefly what he would be like in bed, before refocusing on his identity. Maybe he’s a real-estate