In Colorado, the sun always shines. The sky is usually blue, and when we hang our clean clothes on the line in the backyard they dry in an hour. When you smell them they’re crisp and smell like air. The mountains are to the west of town. This is a new town, 120 years old. They shot indigenous peoples to settle this town. You drive up into the Rockies and see powdery snow on the side of the road. Toward the eastern part of Colorado there are cornfields that go clear across the Midwest, I think. That yonder there is Kansas, I reckon. Anyway, it’s flat, and kind of stunning from inside a car, cows and fields and vistas slashing out in every direction, and the sky above you is a flawless ceiling. God, you think, this would be perfect, if only … if only I had more money, if only it were a couple of years from now, if only Lynn and I were married, or were ready to get married, if I had more friends here—but old friends—or decent places to hang out at, or more of a feeling of what’s next.

They wouldn’t let us come in to the clinic yet. She wasn’t far enough along. We had to wait almost two weeks to have it done. Seven and a half weeks is the magic number, for all you peckerheads taking notes. Anything less, it’s a speck of unremovable dust. Lynn ate saltines before she got out of bed every day, and I brought her a cold glass of club soda. Our friend Tina taught her that.

I’d walk in, hand her the saltines, and sit and look at this girl I’ve been sleeping next to for months and months—five months by then—and I hated her. She was sick now, and I was sick of her, I hated her little puffy knocked-up ass, she looked like a worried old hag, and out of nowhere I’m just not so sure of anything. Why I all of a sudden don’t love her. Because there’s something about her that I’m definitely not too sure about. What if she turns into her mother? Celia’s a joke.