room during the five-hour surgery. When her family arrived, Levi scowled at Beth and Danny hugged her, but Rose refused to acknowledge her only daughter. The women hadn’t spoken and yet Rose knew, somehow had lashed together the outcome of the lawsuit and her husband’s heart attack in an inseparable cause-and-effect grip.
Beth locked herself in a hospital bathroom stall and cried until her eyes swelled shut.
After the procedure she stayed close but settled silently into the shadowy corners of rooms, where Rose would not object to her. Levi and Danny came and went. Dr. Roy, Jacob’s father and Abel’s lifelong friend, was the only other person permitted to visit.
Her father slept a great deal and had little energy for speaking while awake. Absence cost Beth her job at the supermarket, which seemed worthless now. The manager of the feed-and-tack, who’d done business with the Borzois for years, was more understanding and told her to come back when she could.
On Tuesday night, Beth’s body ached for lack of sleep and peace. In bursts of shallow rest she dreamed of tiny antelope grazing on the backs of gigantic wolves, grazing on tufts of gray fur. Their pronghorns were metallic, silvery, and shaped like a stethoscope’s binaural arms and ear tips. The wolves formed a long line and scaled a ski slope with graceful, sure feet, and not one antelope fell off their backs. Then the image fell away and her mind’s eye took an aerial perspective. The wolf line became distant beneath her, an indistinct line on a snowy, furry field. She soon recognized it as one of the distinctive brown rings around another antelope’s neck, which soon came into view.
She could see a reflection of herself on the surface of its enormous eyes. A wolf sat beside her, and she felt unafraid.
Beth’s eyes popped open. Her joints seemed locked at angles in the boxy wood-and-vinyl chair. She held this fixed position, waiting for her body to catch up with her mind before she tried to shift.
The hospital room was black save for a small night-light that cast a weak orange glow across her father’s bed. The heart monitor’s thin green lines created identical mountains in a long range, working silently so all could sleep. Her mother had crawled onto the bed against nurses’ orders. She lay with her back to Beth and her head on its own pillow, close to Abel.
Beth’s parents were murmuring in the low tones of physical weakness that didn’t have anything to do with the time of night, which was so still, so quiet, that she could hear every word.
“. . . time to find your old man,” her father was saying.
“You know we can’t,” said her mother.
“The years heal wounds.”
“Or deepen them.”
“You’ve scarred over, Rosy. Maybe he has too.”
Her mother’s silence magnified the difficulty Abel had drawing a breath.
“I don’t even know for sure where he is, or if he’s alive,” she said after a time.
“You haven’t wanted to know. I’ll bet he’s still in—”
“You’re right. I don’t want to know. He moved on—I’m the one who stayed. He knows where to find me if he wants to.”
“But now—”
“The writing is on the wall, Abel. It’s time to let the ranch go. We’ll sell it all, get this monkey off our backs, and still have enough to buy a quiet place where you can recover.”
Abel’s hair grated on the pillow as he turned his head toward his wife.
“Five generations, Rosy. That ranch is the only place in the world where I can recover.”
“It’s land, not life.”
“It’s our life. The life of . . . all those men. And Lorena now.”
“And what’s that worth to me if it kills you?” Rose pushed herself up onto one arm. From the shadows, Beth could see the tension in the gap between her parents, though they kept their voices low.
Her father seemed so weak. “Garner has the means—”
“Don’t ignore me, Abel. What will we do with this place if you leave us? Levi has no desire to fill your shoes—surely you see that? Danny would, but he’s so young. And Beth”—Rose glanced over and seemed satisfied by her stillness—“her poor judgment harms us all.”
“Rosy, Rosy.” He lifted his IV-injected hand an inch. “I think Garner said something similar about you once upon a time.”
True or not, the claim shut down the conversation. Rose got off the bed like an agile cat, quick and light, and left the room. Beth closed her eyes and pressed down on them with her fingertips.