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Dedication

For my mom, Pat Geiger

Epigraphs

Already I miss Troy

in the summer.

My body propped

on the raft at Booth Lake,

feet stirring the weeds.

—FRANCESCA ABBATE, Troy, Unincorporated

If you live,

you look back and beg

for it again, the hazardous

bliss before you know

what you would miss.

—ADA LIMÓN, “BEFORE”

Prologue

Palm Springs, 2019

Sherri stands outside the employee entrance of the Palm Springs Art Museum and stares at the scrubby mountain behind the building. The early-bird hikers in their floppy hats have captured their sunrise photos and are making their way to the mouth of the trail that lets out just beyond the parking lot. Almost forty years earlier, she’d gone hiking there for the first time. She was drunk, and had wandered over from the Riviera in her bikini and a pair of flip-flops. She still can’t believe she’d made it down without a broken ankle—or worse.

It seems everyone in town is on vacation except for her, and that’s fine. She likes to keep busy, even on her days off. Her boyfriend, Bayard, keeps telling her she should retire, but she can’t imagine what she’d do with herself. She takes a deep breath and prepares for her day the same way she used to brace herself at the start of her shift at the Playboy resort back when she was a Bunny.

She catches her reflection in the glass door—as a special events manager, she knows that it’s important to look like she’s someone who can rise to an occasion. Her hair isn’t as wild as it once was, but it’s still curly, and she’s dyed it the color of champagne so that she won’t look like George Washington. Her nails gleam, her makeup is perfect, and one extra button of her silk blouse is undone. She steps inside and shivers in the blast of air-conditioning. Her feet are tucked tight into the stiletto heels she insists on wearing despite the stern warning from her podiatrist about bunions and hammertoes. She loves the efficient clicks of her measured steps against the parquet floor and the way the sound echoes with purpose through the galleries. In the rhythm she hears the stresses in the lines of the T. S. Eliot poem her father used to recite for her each and every morning when she was a girl: “Dawn points, and another day / Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides. I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.”