Dag Bailey had taken Jules Bart outside. She saw the red brake lights of Bailey’s truck as they were leaving. She imagined Jules’s face illuminated by the dim panel light, an angry sleep deep inside of him and his limp hands vulnerable as a wide, open wound. She looked again at Marjorie Canfield to measure a response.

“Honey, I’m not looking for a fight,” Marjorie said. Louise sat down at the bar long enough so no one could recognize her broken heart.

She knew now he would never touch her thigh or arch his back into the lean darkness of her ribs. She did not have to be hiding in tall grass for him not to see her. She imagined she was invisible to him. He did not see her slide her skirt up the smooth length of her thigh. He did not see the button left unsnapped or the deep shadow between her breasts as she bent forward to order again and again. He looked toward her and saw only the road beyond, the failing smoke of her cigarette. She felt thin around him, thin enough to see through and beyond. And the thought made her feel distant from herself. Unrecognizable. She wondered if she had been defined by both men. Baptiste because he saw only her, Jules because he could not see her at all. Jules Bart and Baptiste Yellow Knife were a shifting of light, a different way of seeing. They could each be beautiful, and ugly. She wanted things to be different from what they were. She didn’t want Jules Bart to be just a man, like Baptiste Yellow Knife. She saw herself standing before twilight watching her image in water, the bottomless pond gurgling. If she could see herself in the shadowy dusk at the moment darkness eclipsed her face she would see her real self. But that moment never came. Only Baptiste Yellow Knife would come for her. The man she despised was the only man thinking of her.

Before sleep she would hear the dry cattails near the pond, the cottonwoods, the steady sucking squawfish. Sometimes she would get up from the warm sleep of her sister to pump a glass of cold water, careful of her sister’s shifting. In the moonlight her slip glowed a ghostly blue that chilled the length of her arms. She sank down against the white light feeling loneliness at the hollow of her knees, her throat swallowing the burning smell of sweet nettle. Hearing the steady breath of her sister in sleep, the sudden jerk, the pulling away, arms meeting knees, a forehead to back, a settling in toward the absence of her body.