“Hey, I’m sorry about that, I didn’t mean for him to wake you. He’s a little rambunctious sometimes.”

Aston had found a place in the dirt and was digging at it with his stick aggressively. “I heard you playing guitar the other day; you’re good,” Aria said.

“Oh thanks, it’s just something I picked up along the way. I’m not really very good, but I enjoy it. Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

“Um, OK,” Aria said, not because she actually drank coffee, but because the way he asked implied it would be a rejection of him instead of the coffee if she were to refuse.

Mike was a man of few words. He talked the way that Aria imagined the cowboys of Wyoming would talk. She liked it. She found herself asking him questions just so she could hear the way his voice sounded. He warmed up the coffee on a little Coleman gas camping stove and poured them each a cup in a pair of blue metal mugs. “Have you met Ciarra yet? She lives just over there,” he said, pointing to the purple van.

“Yes,” Aria said.

“She’s my daughter. We named her Cameron, but she changed it to Ciarra for whatever reason,” Mike said with a smile. Just peering out from underneath his trucker hat, he seemed simultaneously embarrassed and proud to claim her as his own. “I watch Aston for her when she’s on a night shift. She doesn’t stay here that often. Only when she breaks up with one of her boyfriends,” he said, making light of a situation that he obviously disapproved of.

Mike didn’t feel like he had the right to exert much authority over Ciarra. Aria gathered that this was because she had spent the majority of her childhood with her mother and had only reconnected with Mike after she dropped out of high school to live with him.

A large rectangle of cardboard was leaned up against the mouth of his tent. There were three lines written on it that read: No job. Willing to work. God bless. Mike noticed Aria looking at it.

“I’m not a beggar,” he said. “I only use it if I can’t find a job.” Aria smiled back at him to lessen his obvious shame about it.