Driving up ice-slicked Locust Street, Mary-Sue saw the blistering gold dome of the state capitol in the distance. That was the big-city beacon of Daddy’s youth, his beefy adolescence squandered in a farm town named Anita where the big excitement every night was waiting for the Rusty Razor barbershop sign to light up. Des Moines was far from a metropolis in his day and even less of one now. Its streets had become exemplars of wounded glory, gray with once-grand office buildings that collected more echoes and shadows with each passing winter. It was a ghost town in progress.

She’d gotten a call about her father’s death from some kind of relative who still lived in Des Moines and worked part-time at the hospice where he’d spent his last days fighting liver disease.

“Everything’s been arranged, dear,” said the cousin-lady, with her overly soothing switchboard voice. “All you need to do now is show up.”

Mary-Sue remembered screaming into the receiver: “Where do you get off talking to me like this? I’m his fucking daughter!” The rest of it, from the packing of black clothes to the flight from San Francisco to Des Moines, was a complete blur. She had vague recollections, however, of lighting up a joint at the Denver airport and stubbing it out when some silver-haired cowpoke stared at her.

Cruising along the streets of Des Moines, pointedly avoiding her old neighborhood, she peered into the other cars and surprised herself thinking that, apart from the overeaters and the high-waisted geezers with the Dust Bowl faces, Iowans were, by and large, a good-looking people. Donna Reed had been an Iowan originally. John Wayne, Jean Seberg. The people at the airport were all easygoing, wholesome types. A far cry from the hollow-eyed crazies she often encountered roving the streets of San Francisco, vibrating with such intensity they scared even her. She’d always thought that her father was good-looking in his prime, just enough off-handsome he might have been plopped into movies as the leading man’s valet. She had inherited her father’s brown curls and big, watchful eyes; now if she’d simply stop smoking so many damn cigarettes and put some of her old chub back, she’d probably pass for a wholesome Iowan herself.