He was sucking at the air like a fish wishing she'd drop him back in the water.

Kenneth finally remembered the exact phrase. "McEban thinks we fit in our bodies just fine."

She looked at him, smiling, and then back at her son: "You get what you get, and you don't have a fit. Do you understand?"

He nodded, tears dripping from his chin. "I have to go to the bathroom," he said.

After the kids had taken their naps and eaten a square of brownie, she led him into the laundry room and started explaining how to operate the washer and dryer, but when he said he knew about darks and whites and water temperature she let him do it himself.

And then there wasn't anything else she could think of, so he went out in the driveway and shot baskets for an hour until she called him back in.

"I have a present for you," she said.

She held out an iPod and he stared down at it in the palm of her hand, putting his hands in his pockets.

"Do you already have one?"

"They're too expensive."

She looked to the hallway where Kurt was pushing a red plastic truck against his sister's leg. She told him to stop and turned back to Kenneth. "This one's old, and whether you want it or not I'm going to get a new one."

"Maybe Rodney would like it."

"He has his own."

The iPod didn't look all that used. "What would you do with it if I didn't take it?"

She smiled. "You, sir, are one seriously unfun little dude."

"I just like to get things done." He was thinking he had about as much fun as anybody else. "McEban said I couldn't listen to one on the tractor, or when I'm riding a horse, because you can't hear if something bad's happening."

"Well, we don't have a tractor. Or horses, either. It's yours or it gets trashed."

He stared down at his feet, turning them so his toes were pointing straight. McEban had told him that if you learn to walk correctly when you're a kid, your hips and everything else would last a lot longer.

"I guess," he said, "if you're going to throw it away."

"I'm having an accident now." Kurt stood in the hallway, his face full of surprise.

Rodney was tired when he got home but felt better after dinner, sprawling on the living-room floor and wrestling with the little kids, and Kenneth followed Claire up to his room and she turned the computer on.

"What kind of music do you like?" she asked.

"I don't listen to music that much."

"When you do."

He thought about the music in band class, and on the radio, and that his mother played in her trailer when she was home. "Whatever you like would be fine," he said.

He stood at her shoulder, watching her load songs on the iPod, and when she was done she showed him how to operate it. It was easy. He thought it would be. He knew really stupid kids who had one.

Fifteen.

CRANE DROVE DOWN through Ranchester and across to Dayton, continuing west on Highway 14 up the long incline that rose in ascending plateaus through the native grass and sage foothills, finally parking the cruiser in a gravel turnout in a border of pine, the evergreens draping down over the rounded crest of the Bighorns like a throw of darker, greener fabric. He'd gained fifteen hundred feet off the prairie floor and could look back east thirty miles to Sheridan and the sweep of drier, flatter land beyond. through Ranchester and across to Dayton, continuing west on Highway 14 up the long incline that rose in ascending plateaus through the native grass and sage foothills, finally parking the cruiser in a gravel turnout in a border of pine, the evergreens draping down over the rounded crest of the Bighorns like a throw of darker, greener fabric. He'd gained fifteen hundred feet off the prairie floor and could look back east thirty miles to Sheridan and the sweep of drier, flatter land beyond.

The traffic was light. Mostly out-of-state vans and motor homes easing down off the mountain in single-line convoys, the drivers unnerved by the steep grade, geared down and traveling twenty miles under the speed limit. Occasionally a local whistled past, raising a forefinger off the steering wheel to wave. He radioed Starla.

"I'm going to catch some lunch," he told her. "Log me out for an hour."

"Roger that," she said. "BBFN."

He could hear her unwrapping a fresh stick of gum.

"I don't know what that means."

"It stands for bye-bye for now. It's text-message shorthand."

"We aren't texting, we're talking."

"That doesn't mean the rest of us can't intermingle our disciplines. Are you going to run for sheriff again?"

"I hadn't thought about it."

"Seems to me you're losing interest in law enforcement."

He pulled a Ziploc bag from the glovebox and slipped the sandwich out. "Why don't you run against me?"

"LOL."

"Laughing out loud, right?"

"You truly are the hippest of bossmen, boss."

"Just route any calls through to Hank."

"Word that."

He turned the volume down on the radio. A fence ran along the south edge of the turnout, and knotted in the top strand of wire were four pairs of panties, candy-striped, flowered, white and yellow, lifting and quivering in the wind. He finished his sandwich, checked for cell reception, and she answered on the second ring.

"It's me," he said. She'd told him when it was likely she'd be home and Larry wouldn't.

"Hey."

"You doing all right?"

"I'm just fine. What about you?"

"Better now," he said.

"I thought we agreed we weren't going to do the sweet stuff."

"That's your rule, not mine."

"If I remember correctly you said you wanted a friend. We've both got someone to sleep with."

"Have you told Larry we're friends?"

He heard her let the dog out, walk back across what sounded like a tiled floor, pull a chair back, the last raising the hair on his arm. "Where are you?" he asked.

"Did you forget the number you dialed? I'm at home."

"I mean what room."

"I'm in the kitchen."

A tremor started again in his left hand, so he switched the phone to the other. That whole side was worsening faster than the rest of him.

"I haven't told Larry anything about us."

"If we ever get around to phone sex," he said, "do you think Larry would be better than me because his vocabulary's bigger?"

"You must not be calling from the office."

"I'm parked up out of Dayton. On the road that goes over the Bighorns."

"You remember what we used to drink up there?"

"Hamm's."

"It still means a shitty beer was responsible for me losing my virginity and thinking that marrying you was a good idea. Hold on, someone's buzzing through."

The line went dead, to that flat purr he thought of as the sound wiring produced. He looked down at where his hand twitched rhythmically in his lap, then slid it under his thigh, but it wouldn't stop.

"I'm back."

"Do you really think our marriage was that shitty?"

"It's easier to remember it that way."

"It's not how I remember things."

"That's because I'm the one who filed. You, sir, were the dumpee."

"Was that Larry who buzzed through?"

"No, it was somebody else."

"Do you remember the first time we did it?" he asked.

"Did it?"

"That's what we used to call it. That's what everybody called it."

"Now I know where you're parked."

"About ten feet from the exact spot."

"That's really creepy."

"I thought maybe you'd think it was sweet," he said. "But that's no doubt how dumpees view the world."

He heard her open the refrigerator, and a semi passed. He could smell the brake pads burning.

"We shouldn't have waited twelve years," she said. "We didn't have to wait until you got sick to be able to talk."

"I needed to wait." He heard her bite into something. It made a snapping sound. "What was that?"

"It's a carrot, and that was Larry who beeped through. I don't know why I said it wasn't."

"Does he call to say he loves you?"

"He said he was going straight to Don Clayton's after work. A bunch of them play cards on Thursday night. He said he'd eat something there."

"They play even in the summer?"

"All year."

"How late?"

"Late enough," she said. "I've got to go now."

He snapped his phone shut and got out and opened the trunk. He'd been to the drugstore for shaving cream, toothpaste and the extra-strength Advil that helped take the edge off the headaches he got now in the afternoons. He shook it all out of the plastic bag and walked over to the fenceline. The ground was strewn with beer cans, the singed cardboard tubing from bottle rockets, the torn paper and plastic debris from an assortment of fireworks, condoms and their wrappers, several dozen spent shotgun shell casings. He filled the bag and emptied it in a trashcan chained to a post set back in the trees, then filled it again. When he'd picked up all the litter he cut the panties loose and trashed them too. He couldn't remember any party he'd ever attended as a kid that had this kind of variety.

He sat against the open trunk of the cruiser watching cars pass on the highway, thinking that if he were younger, or maybe healthier, this whole scene wouldn't seem so goddamn sad.

After dinner he showered and dressed in jeans and a clean shirt and told Jean he had to go back in to work.

"Is there a crime wave I haven't noticed?" She was tearing open a red Netflix envelope, pulling the DVD out.

"Paperwork," he said. "What'd you get?"