It was quiet here, so quiet that only the sound of a single bird at a time could be heard. Sometimes a dog bark echoed through the boulders and reached me. And periodically the hum of a fighter jet from a nearby air force base broke the quiet with flight drills. Before the sun set, I walked around the property and found paw prints in the dirt leading up to the house. It could have been a dog or a mountain lion. Beside one print I found a dead mouse. It was black and white and its mouth hung open, its paws suspended in air.

I thought about how my father would answer the questions I asked clients.

“What personal trait have you managed to overcome, Dad?”

“Which day of your life would you like to live over again and why?”

“What brings you joy?”

The answers seemed as impossible to guess as anything Daniel or Daphne or Lawrence would say, and I had known him my entire life.

38.

The town had a bar with wooden saloon doors that conjured images of the Old West. It was a bar like those I had come to find in other desert and mountain towns in California, with wood paneling, and tattered dollar bills stuck to the ceiling and every other possible surface, signed by people who had passed through. People who wanted to leave their mark on this place, to have their notes read, and to be remembered. The stools were Naugahyde—a throwback to another time, just like the booths in Daphne’s favorite bar—and taxidermy animal heads punctuated the walls. They had been there so long that each boar head, each buck, had accumulated a layer of dust, and they even had small dust tufts on their whiskers. A shotgun hung above the bar mirror in an overaggressive sign of just what kind of place this was. It was dark and smelled like decades’ worth of beer spilled on the floor, but I sat down anyway, and ordered a drink before I could look around and see if anyone else was in the darkened corners with me.

The bartender brought me a beer and shuffled off back to his phone, which was charging in the corner. I looked around and saw a cluster of men in their fifties hovering over the opposite end of the bar. They wore work clothes, and because it wasn’t even six o’clock, I assumed this was their first stop before home. I’m not sure what I was looking for exactly—maybe just someone else. I imagined they had come from working the salt flats on the edge of town. I had passed them glistening in the sun on my way in. Their boots were caked in white dust and their faces were the kind of tan you get from spending every day working outside.