The wind grew louder through the open window. “I just mean he trusts you,” she said. Albert was eighty-three, and he had welcomed them warmly—unlike some of the locals—without suspicion of their intentions; he said he thought the town could use new blood. He liked Clay’s photographs and always asked Clay about his picture-taking.

“I wonder if we should take him something,” Susan said. “Something he could use.” She tried to think what that would be. Not a book; he didn’t read. He had read the dictionary page by page growing up on a farm, waiting for the wheat to grow, and he knew all the words, but he said books with stories made him tired. Maybe sheet music; he played guitar in a bluegrass band called the Catfish. A retired ethnologist played banjo and mandolin, the local plumber played fiddle. But she didn’t know anything about bluegrass.

“Albert gets along all right,” Clay said.

Behind them the water sample rolled to the other side of the car with a thump as they turned off the highway. Susan flipped the visor mirror down to see if there was dust on her face, and pushed her hair behind her ears. Her skin had taken on the color of the desert bluffs, she thought, wrinkled at the corners of her eyes. Clay seemed to be moving in the opposite direction: in spite of the gray in his hair, he looked younger.

They pulled up past Albert’s irrigated peach trees and parked between his sky-blue ’65 Ford truck and a washing machine missing all four sidewalls, so only the top and the guts remained. A pile of cut sandstone from the pioneer days, chiseled by pioneer hands, spilled down a slope into the rice grass and knapweed. Susan scanned the pale red blocks, wondering, not for the first time, how much exactly there was, how much might be buried in the lawn and under the visible stone. The stone had once been a schoolhouse. On a pilgrimage to the library in Blanding, Susan had looked up an old sepia photograph of boys in caps and girls in aprons standing before a tidy one-room structure with a peaked roof, the blocks held together by mortar now long eroded.

Clay went first up the porch steps, his hair flattened on one side from camping on the property, his two-day beard speckled with white. She followed, conscious of their empty-handedness, their lack of an offering when one should be made. As Clay pulled open the screen door to knock, he said, “You ask.”

“You’ll help,” she said. Then the door opened.

She was shocked by how much older Albert looked. A padded white brace over his shirt held back both shoulders but didn’t keep him upright; he bent at the waist as if to make up for the straightness of his braced spine. His eyes, behind thick glasses, were watery and gray.