Because Jill worked housekeeping, she smelled, in his bed, like lavender fabric softener. Eventually, his happiness took the shape of a ticking bomb. From the moment of her arrival, he began to prepare for the blow of her departure. On her last night, he readied himself for the sadness that would unfold come morning, but it was during these final teary hours that Jill had invited Cliff to join her in Kansas once his contract was over. “I have extra room in my closet. You can park for free on the street.” Together, they would live as a normal couple in the real world, far from the bubble of seasonal work.

When his contract ended in October, he made the long and mostly flat drive to Kansas only to be dumped ten days later. “You’re just not the kind of guy I want to date here,” Jill had explained. At the park, he’d been popular and interesting—he rock climbed and could identify edible plants and had, on more than one occasion, returned to Jill’s room with a grocery bag of fresh huckleberries— but in Kansas, he was just another average-looking, uneducated freeloader. Nobody cared that he had once climbed the Grand Teton with a broken thumb, or that he’d helped a ranger chase down a man who threw a bag of Doritos into a thermal pool. Here, his history counted for nothing. He had no friends. He was not in school. He was no one.

He could feel it in himself, too. He was an entirely different person in Kansas than he’d been in Yellowstone, just as he was an entirely different person in Yellowstone than he’d been in Connecticut, where he’d finished high school with a B average and spent two mind-numbing years watering plants at his dad’s nursery while taking classes at the juco. What this meant about him as a person he could not say, but he knew it wasn’t good. He did not want to be the type of man whose appeal depended on location or circumstance.

Heidi hummed and nodded. “It’s a sad story, but I’m mostly concerned about your education. You never finished undergrad?”

“I’m dyslexic,” Cliff explained, hurt that she didn’t care about his broken heart. “The readings got too hard. And seasonal work was fun. I’m a good bartender—I can talk to people.”

“Oh, phooey,” she said, grabbing for another cookie. “Reading’s just one way of getting at information. But I see what you mean.” She took a bite of her cookie, crumbs falling into her lap. “I can help you, if you’d like.”

“Help me?”

“If you live here, I can help you get started at the university in the winter. My husband was a professor, so I’m familiar with the system. We can get you some financial aid, maybe some grants. Most important, I can help you with your readings. It’d be good for me. I’m out of my mind with boredom, with my husband gone.”

Cliff considered the idea. He could go back to school, where he would become the type of person Jill wanted. The type of person who belonged in a town like this one. He could feel a sense of hope rising inside him. All along, his ticket back to Jill—back to a life he could be excited about—had been just a few stop signs away, on a street named after a state he’d never been to. What did he know about Alabama? Nothing. There was a possibility he could not locate it on a map.