“Okay, babe. Have a good morning. Can’t wait for tonight,” she said. Pumpkin stew, ice cream, trick-or-treaters, bed.

He kissed her again, and then she watched him saunter away, the slight, to-the-left lean of his wide shoulders, the almost disproportionately long legs that looked as if they were always about to take off in a gallop, the light that always seemed to radiate off of him.

◆◆◆

Her massage client lay beached on the massage table on the lawn by the outdoor stone fireplace that smelled of old ashes. A roadrunner streaked by with a clicking-clucking sound, but the man didn’t flinch or look up. Green frond shadows swayed across his body as Izzy kneaded his back with her lavender-oiled hands.

“Hot today,” he said.

“Yeah. Hot.”

He was silent for a while, which was a relief; she didn’t feel like chatting.

“You gotta love it. Do you love it?”

“What?” she asked.

“Hot. The heat.”

“It’s a little scary,” she said. She normally wouldn’t have shared so much, especially with a guy like this, but she’d been caught off guard, thinking of Cyrus and the night they’d planned.

“Scary, why scary? It’s gorgeous. Where I come from, it’s freezing right now.”

“I mean because of climate change,” Izzy said.

“Climate change?” He guffawed. “What climate change? Darlin’ that’s just a myth made to scare girls like you. Which, I guess it worked.”

Sweat didn’t bother her, it couldn’t in her business, but his odor seemed toxic, even putrid. “No,” she said. “No. Sorry. It’s real.” She dug her hands into the clammy meat of his shoulders, now slick with grease, and he groaned. “We have to do something about it, you think?”

“Anything you say,” the man moaned as she knuckled his hairy calves. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Izzy, dreaming of Cyrus, hardly heard him.

◆◆◆

When they got home that night, Izzy and Cyrus listened to Nevermind while they prepared the stew from the pumpkin, corn, and beans they grew in their own three-sisters garden. They rolled masa into balls, patted them, cut out circles with the rim of a water glass, and cooked the tortillas on the stovetop. They spooned the stew into the tortillas and ate their fill. After dinner they shared, with one spoon, a bowl of homemade rose petal ice cream. Izzy’s creation. It tasted, she thought, like her love for him.

They had constructed the cradle-to-cradle-style shack in Salton City from environmentally sound scraps and recycled window glass on land he’d bought with money from his construction business. Cyrus designed the house, drew up the plans, then he and Izzy built it together. They laid the pink adobe tiles and set them with grout. Izzy planted peppermint, basil, rosemary, thyme, and marjoram in the window boxes. Cyrus installed the swamp cooler, an evaporative system that originated from ancient windcatchers that caught air and passed it over subterranean waters. He built her a bookcase and arranged her vintage encyclopedias, her homeopathy and law books by color and size. On top of the bookcase, Izzy placed flowers and her candles and the crystals that she liked to believe had healing properties—malachite, amethyst, and rose quartz. A shrine to her books. Reading, she’d told him, saved her life as a kid. She’d sneak out of her parents’ trailer at night with her books and her flashlight. Fueled by this food and illumination, she believed she might escape.