“I’m here about the room,” he told her.

She looked him up and down. “You a Harvard boy? My husband was a Harvard boy.”

He remembered his T-shirt, which read HARVARD ROWING TEAM. “Not exactly,” he said. “I’m from Connecticut. Picked this up at a thrift store.”

“Connecticut,” she said, as if it were a new word. “What brought you to Kansas? School?”

“A girl, actually,” he said. It seemed, now, like a stupid reason.

“It’s either school, a job, or a girl,” she said. “Or death. Those are the only reasons for coming to Kansas. Unless you’re born here, of course. Then it’s a matter of escaping.” She smiled, letting Cliff know this was a joke.

Cliff wanted to disagree, to find some more romantic view of the plains, but the truth was that he knew nothing about the area except that you couldn’t buy liquor at the grocery store and that the governor was something of a madman. “It’s not a bad place,” he said. “The people seem nice.” He hoped this would make the woman like him. He often worried that women did not like him.

“It’s the trade off,” she said. “No mountains or water but people will look you in the eye.”

He nodded, suddenly self-conscious of whether he’d been making eye contact.

“Well, let’s get you inside. Seems there’s a lot to talk about.”

Based on the exterior, Cliff expected cross-stitches and doilies, stale potpourri and cat litter, but the kitchen had chrome appliances and marble counters and the air smelled like hazelnut coffee. Through a bay window he could see that the backyard was large and well kept, with wicker patio furniture and a garden bed. In the living room, a set of tasteful blue throw pillows were arranged just so. It could have been his mother’s house. Or Jill’s.

Cliff was nervous. He knew it was an interview, but it seemed more for the sake of a nice time than anything else. She brought out a plate of ginger cookies and two glasses of milk. She told him her name was Adelheid DeLuca, but she would prefer if he called her Heidi.

“I’m Clifford, like the big red dog,” he told her, “but you can call me Cliff.”

This made her smile. She was prettier when she smiled. “So what’s the news about this girl?”

“It’s a long story,” Cliff said, although he worried maybe it wasn’t— that it was, in actuality, a fairly simple tale of love undone by location.

“That’s all right,” Heidi said. “I like stories.”

He found it a relief to tell someone, to hand over the story as if each part were a weight in a bag he hadn’t realized he was carrying. As he talked, Heidi ate cookies and twirled the fringe of a woven placemat. He could tell it had been a while since anyone had told her a story.

His went like this.

He had met Jill four months before, at a lodge in Yellowstone where he’d been working as a bartender. Because she was in college, Jill had come late in the season and had a plan to leave early, before her classes started. New employees brought fresh air to the lodge, which, to those who had been there since April, had grown suffocating in its remoteness. Like all newbies, Jill was immune to the tourists and the frustrations of communal living. She was still in awe of Yellowstone and would, many times per day, make time to watch Old Faithful hiccup into the sky. She came to the lodge like Noah’s dove, bearing proof that the world outside the park was still alive and well. She had stories about her life in college, about professors and exams and the reprieve of house parties. She still craved Chinese food and movie theaters, luxuries Cliff had learned to live without.