She reached out, the other arm wrenched back at an unnatural angle. "Crane?" She sounded relieved. Like he'd been gone for a while, and just now come home.

"Yeah," he said, trying to hold her still, but she was slippery with blood. "I'm right here."

"I so fucked this up." She relaxed into him.

"You're going to be fine."

Blood welled from her mouth, and she gagged and spat, but managed to take a deep breath. "I love you," she said. "I'm sure of it now."

He bent close enough that she could understand, each word spoken clearly. "I love you too," he said.

Thirty-one.

THEY WAITED A WEEK and held the memorial service at the Horse Creek Community Hall off 343, where the borrow ditch was shallow enough that people could line their outfits along the highway's shoulder once the parking lot filled up. The sky was dark, low-hanging and muggy enough to rain, but it never did. Reverend Harrison from the Missouri Synod Lutheran officiated, invoking the soul's reunion with the divine so effectively that a good portion of the mourners felt a sense of ease, reasoning that if Jean could be allowed entrance to heaven, they would be as well. Marin selected the hymns. The crowd stood while they sang, the men in freshly pressed jeans and sports jackets faintly smelling of dry-cleaning fluid, their hats held at their waists, their foreheads pale as ivory. Some had ties knotted around their necks. Some had shined their boots. The women wore their best dark dresses and the children fidgeted, stealing sly smiles from one another, their thoughts reeling through the possibilities of a summer afternoon. Einar sat very straight on his folding chair in the front row with his hat turned up in his lap, Marin on one side and Griff and Crane on the other. It was over at three. and held the memorial service at the Horse Creek Community Hall off 343, where the borrow ditch was shallow enough that people could line their outfits along the highway's shoulder once the parking lot filled up. The sky was dark, low-hanging and muggy enough to rain, but it never did. Reverend Harrison from the Missouri Synod Lutheran officiated, invoking the soul's reunion with the divine so effectively that a good portion of the mourners felt a sense of ease, reasoning that if Jean could be allowed entrance to heaven, they would be as well. Marin selected the hymns. The crowd stood while they sang, the men in freshly pressed jeans and sports jackets faintly smelling of dry-cleaning fluid, their hats held at their waists, their foreheads pale as ivory. Some had ties knotted around their necks. Some had shined their boots. The women wore their best dark dresses and the children fidgeted, stealing sly smiles from one another, their thoughts reeling through the possibilities of a summer afternoon. Einar sat very straight on his folding chair in the front row with his hat turned up in his lap, Marin on one side and Griff and Crane on the other. It was over at three.

Half the crowd followed Crane and Griff back to the house and the women carried in their covered dishes, arranging them on the table in the kitchen, slicing a ham and setting out buns and soft drinks, brewing an urn of coffee. Crane had a keg of beer out on the sunporch, iced down since dawn.

They gathered in knots across the lawn and in the kitchen and living room, talking together about how Crane might get along without her, remembering funny conversations they'd had with Jean, laughing quietly, finally settling into observations about the weather, cattle prices, remodelings. Only Griff stayed back to help clean up.

"I should've had something to say." Crane was sitting at the table, his suit coat hanging on the back of the chair.

Griff was bent at the refrigerator, stacking the last of the casserole dishes inside and smoothing the strips of masking tape with the owner's last name printed out.

"I could've told a story about when we were first dating. Something like that."

She sat with him at the table. "You want another coffee?"

"Will you stay for one?"

She filled their cups at the urn. "That was a nice-looking woman you were talking to." She was stirring sugar into her coffee.

"I talked to a lot of women today."

"The one who was flirting with you. Wearing a blue dress." She stood and dragged the two black garbage bags leaning against the counter out onto the sunporch and sat down again. "Is she the one?"

"No, it wasn't her," he said. "And the one it was isn't anymore."

She toed her dress shoes off.

"Anyway, your mother and I lasted longer than you probably thought we would."

"You were the record," she said.

He got up, lifting the ham out of the refrigerator and peeling the plastic wrap back. He stood at the counter picking glazed pieces from the rim of the plate, nibbling. "I don't know why I'm still hungry," he said.

"Maybe that's why we never really tried very hard at the father-daughter thing." She sipped her coffee. "I guess you knew I didn't think she'd keep you around all that long."

"I could tell."

She filled her cup again. It felt good to have her shoes off. There were still red creases where the straps had cut across the tops of her feet. "She thought it would've been better if I hadn't lived out at the ranch."

"I could've made more of an effort, though."

She shrugged. "I didn't either."

"You were just a kid then."

"I never was," she said, "not really."

She stood again, reaching up under her dress, hooking the waistband of her pantyhose and pulling them down over her hips. When he realized what she was doing, he looked out the window.

"It doesn't mean I don't care about you." She was sitting now, wadding the hose onto the seat of the chair to her side. She crossed a foot up on her knee and scratched at the arch.

"You think you'd want this house?" he asked.

"Like to live in?"

"Yeah."

"Where would you go?"

He put the ham back in the refrigerator. "I'm retiring."

She was staring into the living room as if she'd never noticed it before. "I read somewhere," she said, "that you shouldn't make decisions after someone close to you dies. Not for a year. Not big ones, anyway."

"I was thinking about it before she died."

She switched feet.

"That would make who, Hank Kosky, the sheriff?"

"You never know who people might vote for."

She straightened her legs and held her feet together, stretching her toes. "You'd really leave?"

"I've been here most of my life."

She sat up straight in her chair, tucking her legs back along the sides. "I think you should keep it. You could rent it to somebody in case you changed your mind."

He sat down again. "She said she thought about what it would be like if I died." He tried his coffee and it had gone cold, so he carried the cup to the sink. "She said it like it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen."

"That was just Mom." She lifted her purse from the table, opening it on her lap and stuffing her pantyhose in.

"Will you take some of this food with you?"

She stood up. "Not tonight."

"It'll just go bad."

"I'll get it tomorrow. I thought I'd come over and box up some things. Her clothes. Some other stuff."

"That doesn't have to happen right away."

"It'll make me feel like I'm doing something."

She had her purse slung over her shoulder and her shoes in that hand when she hugged him.

He kept his body very still, willing the tremors out of the muscles in his arms. He thought the beer had probably helped. "I care about you," he said.

She kissed him on the cheek. "Me too." She stepped to the door. "I'm not sure what I'm doing either. I don't think it's all hit me yet."

On Monday he talked with his attorney and had Griff made his sole beneficiary. He drew up a living will, called about his pension plan and Social Security, got his meager 401(k) switched over to her. He thought about looking at nursing homes in Billings, then decided he needed to be farther away. The next day he drove to Denver. He found a place in Englewood he thought he could afford. It was clean and the staff looked like they'd seen so many people die it wasn't a shock anymore. That's what he wanted. Efficiency with no tears.

He got drunk in a downtown bar that night and had a seizure in the taxi riding back to his motel, then tipped the cabbie more than he needed to.

On the drive home he stopped in Sheridan for dinner and was just finishing when Helen and Larry came in. They turned away, speaking with their heads drawn close together, and then Larry nodded and she took his hand and they walked straight to the table.

"I'm so sorry about Jean," she said.

Larry shook his hand. "We should have come to the funeral."

"She drew a big crowd anyway."

They all nodded. There was laughter from a table by the windows.

"Will you join us?" She was staring down at what was left of his meal.

"I'd better get going."

"For a drink, then."

There were voices at the front of the restaurant. They turned and saw a young man in a wheelchair talking with the hostess, explaining something. Both his legs were gone, his jeans folded back at the knees, his haircut still high and tight. The girl pushing the chair stared down at him and didn't look up.

"I wish Dick Cheney was here," Helen said. "I wish he had to see a boy like that every day for the rest of his life."

Larry shook his head. "Know that Jean's in our prayers," he said.

"Thank you."

She hugged him. "I need you to believe how truly sorry I am," she said.

He nodded. He kept his eyes open, breathing through his mouth so he wouldn't smell her hair. She stepped away, "Have a good vacation," he said.

"Buenas noches," Larry said. Larry said.

She stood between them with her hands laced at her waist, her jaw clenched, and they both knew this was the stance she took in public when she thought she might cry.

Thirty-two.

IN THE EVENINGS, after eating his dinner at a cafe around the corner from the office, he'd drive out to the house and give her garden a couple of hours. Hoe the weeds, harvest whatever was ripe, turn the sprinklers on for a good soak. The first night after her death he'd carried a box of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and bell peppers over to the next-door neighbor's, but they'd looked at him with such pity that he now brought the produce into the office, encouraging Starla and his deputies to pick through it. He learned there was far too much zucchini in the world and that he slept better on the cot in the cell. One night Pearl brought in a plate of cookies.

He thought he might buy a van and drive to Arizona. Have a look at the Grand Canyon, loop down into Mexico and poke around. But what if his condition worsened and he couldn't make it back? That's how it had gone with his grandfather. He'd been able to sit up at the table and mash his food around enough to swallow, then two weeks later was in a wheelchair, wearing a neck brace to keep his head level and sucking his meals up through a straw. Anyway, he couldn't imagine choking to death in a foreign country and didn't want some stranger he couldn't understand shoving a catheter in his dick.

He drove past the house before turning back south and out of town. The front door was propped open, Einar's truck parked in the driveway with boxes in the back. Griff passed in front of the living-room window.

The traffic was light. Ranch families, tourists, a tractor idling along the shoulder, a carload of teenagers coming into town going ninety. He could see the expression of alarm on the driver's face and watched in the rearview mirror as the kid stood on the brakes, locking them, damn near rolling it. He imagined their panic, their laughter, too young to honestly believe they'd been seconds away from dying, now pitching beer bottles two and three at a time into the borrow ditch, arguing who among them could walk the straightest line, contemplating how they'd get to school or get laid with no driver's license, what story they'd fabricate for their parents.

His dad had taught school. He'd also taught him how to roll the gauze pads and wedge them around the outside of his grandfather's bottom teeth, after plucking out the soaked rolls, the old man silently drooling. He remembered the apology in his eyes, unable by then to voice his thanks. Finally, the gauze wasn't enough and they had to knot a bath towel around his neck.

His dad had done the heavy lifting. In and out of bed and the wheelchair, on and off the shitter. He'd rigged a canvas sling from the bathroom ceiling, like a suspended lawn chair, to get his father in under the shower. He'd strip down and get in with him, soaping, rinsing carefully. And then it was just sponge baths on the bed, the old man's legs swollen red, purple and blue.

He turned off on Cabin Creek, stretching his mouth open wide, working his chin back and forth to relax the muscles in his jaw. He'd had another seizure last night, waking with it, biting at his tongue. He could still taste the blood in his mouth.

The tires rattled the plank bridge and he swung the cruiser around through the workyard, parking by the barn. There was only Brady's truck and the rusted hulk of a '52 DeSoto down on its rims, burdock and snakeweed growing out through the broken windows, the chrome hood ornament of Hernando's head hack-sawed off.

He unholstered his revolver, releasing the cylinder and turning the barrel up, the cartridges falling onto the palm of his hand. The doctor-his name was Scott-had said it was a pulmonary embolism that killed the old man. It happened at dawn. Probably during one of the nightmares he'd begun having. The lungs fill with blood, maybe you cough in your sleep, thrash once or twice, and you're gone. Just that fast. Dr. Scott said if he had ALS it's how he'd want to go, but he hadn't been the one to clean up the mess. He thumbed the cartridges back into their chambers, all six of them, and snapped the cylinder home.

He didn't ease the door shut when he got out of the car but slammed it hard, flushing a party of gray jays from the apple tree in front of the house. A single horse was circling the corral, neighing.

Inside the barn it was just as the girl had said it would be. No hoofstrikes or the odors of clover or timothy or animal dung, only the scratching of packrats in the loft, the light falling in dust-filled shafts from the row of windows under the eaves. Stereos, televisions, computers and firearms stacked carelessly against the walls as high as a man could lift. The stalls overflowing with cameras, VCRs, DVD players, antique furnishings, saddles, chain saws, power tools, wrench sets, table saws, joiners, a planer and drill press. He didn't bother to part the sheets of milky plastic hanging from the rafters above the last stall. He knew what he'd find in there, his eyes already watering from the bite of ammonia, the mix of cooked chemicals.

"That you, old buddy?"

He turned to the granary door. He could feel the weak sunlight on his shoulders, on the back of his neck. It felt like a caress. "Right here," he called.

There was Brady's distinct laughter behind the door. "You want a beer?"

He slid his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Still the taste of blood. "I'm all right." He gripped the revolver, holding it at his waist as he stepped through the door. He felt relaxed, fluid, just a boy coming to see his friend.

"Well, look at you," Brady said. "Wyatt Earplooking son of a bitch that you are." He was sitting across the room in a cushioned chair, with a floor lamp by his side, books stacked around the base. A hooked rug in front of the chair. A card table crowded with rows of bound bills, tens and twenties and fifties. "I've been waiting all day for this."

He bent over the arm of the chair and pulled a beer out of the cooler. The ice shifted. He offered the can and Crane shook his head. A pistol lay across Brady's thighs. "Suit yourself." A vein was pulsing in his pale neck, sweat dripping from his nose. "This is it? Just you?" He sipped the beer, wiped his mouth. "I was hoping for a SWAT team."

On the walls were framed photographs of their families mounted and moving cows. He and Brady at a branding, in a snowdrift with their schoolbooks.

"Remember when we tried to drop a new engine in that old DeSoto?" Brady asked.