Leslie tried to keep her eyes open and respond to Jake’s chat—mostly stuff about this Kelly girl who’d chosen a pair of polyamorous forestry colleagues over him and Alamo—but was lulled toward sleep by the warmth and motion of the truck. She napped after she was assured, via a McDonald’s coffee stop, that Jake wasn’t going to drift off and run the truck over the edge of a mountain. She woke up with the sour taste of sleep in her mouth and the sun shining in her eyes.

“Are we close?” she said.

“Closer than we were,” said Jake.

They were passing through a dune-patched stretch of dirt, pretty, if you were into desolation. They found a country station and Leslie resisted the urge to extemporize on the political implications of twenty-first-century female revenge narratives, namely that they were a backdoor endorsement of the anti-feminist swill that was washing ashore in America of late. Chicks are some crazy, dude. They’ll smash your shit if you break up with them. Better to keep letting them cook and clean for you if that’s what makes them happy. Jake sang along to the boy songs about backyards and barbecues in a chinny voice that indicated he recognized they were awful. Still, he knew all the words.

At a gas station on tribal land, a trio of smoking cowboy-hatted men eyed her. On my way to squat briefly over a cold, filthy toilet, gents. Welcome to join, if that’s your thing. She got internally confrontational out here whenever she got outside of Missoula, and sometimes when she was still in town, too. It was rarely overt, but there was still a lot of implied Western bullshit going on, as much from the older women as from the men. Something like, Shut up and get tough. She got it. She’d never gutted an elk. Never fucking would.

Jake was at the counter when she walked out of the bathroom.

“Are you buying a gas station breakfast sandwich?” she said.

“Um, no?” he said. “It just … looks that way? Do you want one?”

“That’s okay. I’ll just get these.” She threw a bag of honey-roasted peanuts on the counter. “And I’m going to get a coffee, too.”

“Am I paying for this?” he said.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “Sorry. I can put it on my card.”

“I was just kidding,” he said.

“Okay. I mean, I kind of figured it’s, like, two bucks, and I’ll get the next one or whatever.”

“It is seriously not in any way a problem,” he said.