glued at the hip. A blowhard cowboy and his midget wife, both carrying large iced-coffee drinks. Last to arrive was a trim, stylish woman whose blunt-cut blond hair and wispy bangs gave her an ethereal Scandinavian look—but she came with her daughter, who was quite possibly the most obese girl Peter had ever seen.
Which had worried him: didn’t they have weight limits, for safety reasons? What kind of an organization was this?
The trip had not been Peter’s idea. Back in Cincinnati, he’d been moping for weeks, complaining to his sister that their mother was going to spend another entire SUMMER asking him to come over and water her PEONIES every other night and he needed a fucking BREAK from that woman. Just because he was out of work and just because Miss Ohio dumped him a year ago didn’t mean he was available to step in as his mother’s gardener.
Finally his sister got sick of listening to him complain, and she booked a last-minute spot with Coconino Explorations. She’d gone on a river trip with them the year before and loved it, and now wanted the whole world to go. Peter reminded her that he couldn’t swim, that he didn’t trust sunscreen, and that he was allergic to organized trips where you had to hold hands every time you crossed the street. Plus, canyons made him claustrophobic. Plus, he was trying to quit smoking.
“Peter. Stop. It’s paid for,” said his sister. “And it’s really, really beautiful, and you’ll come back a changed person, and some big map company will offer you a cushy job.”
And so Peter got on that plane to Phoenix, if only to escape his mother for two weeks. He trusted his sister when she told him that the guides made everyone wear a life jacket, that his chances of falling into the water were slim. He told himself that Miss Ohio would hear about this and realize how adventurous he was and regret her decision to marry someone else. He was even all set to allow that perhaps he’d meet someone hot on the trip—until he walked into the orientation meeting and realized he’d committed himself to two weeks of forced group therapy.
Now Peter stepped off the bus into hundred-degree heat. It didn’t seem very canyonlike. The beach was junky and crowded and noisy. They got a pep talk; he made it through Life Jackets and Gear Loading and River Safety and wondered if the bus driver would take him back to Flagstaff.
But then the Trip Leader introduced the other two guides, and everything changed.
She was wearing a beat-up straw hat and faded red shorts and a tattered pink shirt knotted at the waist that revealed her belly button. She had two braids that brushed against her shoulders and wore a silver charm on a leather band around her neck. She barely stopped to wave hello, though Peter couldn’t take his eyes off her as she worked on her boat, lugging boxes and crates and yanking straps and coiling ropes; and when she dunked a bandanna in the water and tied it around her neck, he had to blink, to make sure it was real.
Was there any question, any question at all, which boat he was going to choose?
As soon as JT dismissed them, Peter casually wandered down to the shoreline and stood by her boat.
“Need some help?” he finally asked.
“Nope,” she said, flashing a smile, and then she pirouetted from one boat to the other, bending and coiling and knotting and hoisting; what she was doing, Peter couldn’t tell, but it seemed to require a good deal of expertise, and she finally pranced back to her own boat. Peter hadn’t moved.
“Here,” and she tossed him a snarl of rope, “untangle that, if you wouldn’t mind. Hey Abo! Is this your bag? Don’t make me haul your shit!” and Peter, whose mother had time and again asked him to untangle a skein of yarn only to have him scoff at the idea (for he had hoops to sink and weights to lift and a V-8 engine that needed revving), now found himself lovingly coaxing apart the strands of a white nylon rope that, for all the times it had touched Dixie’s hands, had instantly taken on the intimacy of the entire contents of her top bureau drawer.
So that when the blowhard cowboy from Wyoming rounded everyone up for a group photo, he found himself smiling self-consciously, knowing she might be watching.
5
Day One
Miles 0–4
After JT’s lecture, Evelyn Burns,