Nephy smiled with baby-sized teeth. She leaned forward, revealing her even more-generous-than-usual cleavage. Izzy got a whiff of patchouli oil and jasmine. The patchouli conjured the pale pinkish-white deadnettle-family flowers from which, Izzy knew, the scent was derived. “Same,” Nephy said. She beamed around the table. “We are all lucky to have each other.”

They raised three glasses of water and a beer and clinked again.

“To the beautiful and the strange,” Cyrus said.

Precious Things

That Halloween morning, Cyrus drove them to work at the 29 Palms Inn. Izzy opened the truck’s passenger window and her hair blew around her head in a squall. Sand gritted her mouth like particles of splintered, macerated bone. When they came to a sudden stop, something skidded out from under the seat and hit the back of her foot. She bent to pick it up: an old-school cassette tape. On the front, Cyrus had scrawled the words “For You” in Sharpie. She showed it to him.

“That’s where it went,” he said, looking back at the road.

“Thank you.” She pushed the cassette into the car stereo. Nineties music blasted. The brutal, beautiful sound of their love.

The hills lay crumpled like discarded animal pelts, and beneath the truck tires, streaks of red stained the road as if the eviscerated landscape had bled to death. Izzy didn’t want to imagine what else the red stains might be. Billboards of the various Deadly Sins—the gluttony of fast food, the greed of gambling, the pride of plastic surgery, the lust of strip clubs advertised by baby-faced women. Other signs: “Child Molestation: It Doesn’t Just Happen to Girls” with a picture of a sad young man. “Sex Trafficking? Get Help!” “Reward: $10,000. MURDERED. We will find you!”

Cyrus drove past the exits for Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Pioneertown, and then pulled off the highway and parked in the dusty lot of the 29 Palms Inn. He and Izzy walked past the lagoon where a red houseboat bobbed on algae-dark water. The twenty-nine date palms for which the inn had been named, one planted by the Serrano Indians for each baby boy born at the Oasis of Mara, seemed to lean in, listening for clues. The dates, gathering heat from the sun, fattened with sugar. Whole civilizations had depended on them for energy, Izzy knew. The dry palm fronds rattled softly as if bemoaning the invasion of long-dead prospectors who had come to use water from the Oasis and extract gold from the earth at the Anaconda, Lost Horse, and Desert Queen mines. Soon after the arrival of the miners, the Serrano and Chemehuevi Indians abandoned Mara.

Cyrus had some repair work at the inn, and Izzy had booked a massage client. “I’ll see you at noon by the pool,” he said, kissing her on the mouth. “Text me if you need me.” It was what he always said when he left. He smelled like sage and American Spirit smoke and tasted like the tang of the almonds he pulverized every time he tried to quit tobacco. She liked to bury her face into his body, smell his scent, rub against him to make herself smell just like him. Sometimes, when he was away at work, she’d sniff his pillowcase, his T-shirts. It was weird, she knew. She depended on him too much—physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially—but he had rescued her in a way, just by moving to town when they were young. Cyrus made her feel safe.