Jake decided to take a more southerly route back to Nebraska, one that would lead them down to the Lincoln Highway in Utah and then east through Rock Springs, Laramie, Cheyenne. They spent a night in Evanston, and when they left in the morning, Emaline saw the red-brick buildings of the state hospital, the asylum where Ida Mae had spent her last days, the place Eli had been visiting when Velma died. Life was so short. A person needed to find a better way to live, something better than all this madness with Jake, madness without end. What she wanted more than anything was to live in a place where people didn’t yell at one another for no reason at all, where no one was going to pull up stakes and drive thirteen hundred miles because they saw a frog in a tree.

The Dodge died five miles west of Rock Springs. A trucker gave them a tow to a garage, where the mechanic pronounced the Dodge dead on arrival. He said he might be able to find a rebuilt engine that would take them the rest of the way to Scottsbluff, but it would probably take a week. Jake exploded, put his fist through a window of the car. Emaline tore up an old shirt and bandaged his hand, but he exploded again when they got to the motel, where they rented a room for the week. There were bedbugs in the sheets, the frigid wind found every crack. Red had a bad cold, Emaline was so worn-out she could hardly look after him. Jake paced and cursed, paced and cursed until she told him to go out because he was going to make her crazy. It wouldn’t matter now. He had no money left for grifters.

This time he turned up a job. A rancher who had broken a leg in a fall from a windmill needed someone to work two troublesome horses. Jake was sure he was the man for the job. The ranch was right on the edge of town, so Jake was going to head out the next morning. If it worked out, they could stay in an abandoned bunkhouse on the ranch for a few weeks and either wait for the Dodge to be fixed or swap it for a car that would go the rest of the way.