Deschutes took a sip of wine, closed his eyes. “San Francisco was expensive—we didn’t have jobs. So when your dad found work for us in Lawrence, in the card business, I followed him.” He licked his lips, as if tasting the decision. “I was a chickenshit, so I followed him.”

“Why didn’t she come with?”

The old man laughed. “You can’t take a girl from California and stick her in Kansas. It’d be like putting a fish in a tree.”

“Sounds like she would have come with if you’d have asked her.”

“Well, I didn’t ask her.” He stared out at the ground, and then yawned, his whole body shuddering. “How about you come back tomorrow,” Deschutes said. “Don’t get up early or anything. Just come when you feel like it.”

Peter already knew that he would set an alarm so he could do a sunrise drive through the country. He went as if to shake Deschutes’s hand but realized that the old man’s only hand was occupied by the letters. What remained of his left hand was concealed by a shirt-sleeve pinned shut at the end. Peter wondered how long it had taken Deschutes to adjust to the missing hand, how long before he’d learned to reach with the right instead of the left. Someone once told him that it took half the length of a relationship to get over a breakup. A hand seemed like an equally dramatic loss, but Peter couldn’t be sure. A hand did not disappear intentionally, to spite the arm, nor was there the maddening possibility that it might someday return.

That night, Peter called Rena. No answer. It was possible she was on a hitch. She’d explained her schedule before she left, how her crew would spend ten days in the backcountry followed by six days in Bozeman, where they would share a cheap apartment. He’d been keeping track of the days but it was possible something had changed—perhaps they’d left early. Perhaps she was already in the wilderness, even further out of reach.

He kept his phone by his side as he looked up flights from Kansas City to Bozeman. From a single night of painting he could afford more than half the plane ticket. He would need a couple hundred dollars more, to cover whatever he wouldn’t be making at the shirt store while he was gone, as well as some extra cash for food, and maybe a motel room or two along the way, if things with Rena went sour. He would not tell her he was coming but would instead show up bearing flowers, or a box of those expensive French caramels she liked from the co-op, or maybe both. He would do what he could and then hope for the best. Fifty years from now, he would not have to wonder: What if?

In the morning, Peter filled a Thermos with coffee and made the drive to Vinland. He put the windows down and hung his arm out like he used to as a kid, feeling the texture of the air. Over the course of the drive, the sky went from deep gray to purple, finally settling on a soft white the color of paper.