Ruth couldn't pin the news to one side or another with any honesty at all. She'd been nineteen when she'd climbed into Del's old Falcon, left Colorado for glamorous nights in Vegas, stylish dresses she didn't have to make herself, sets of matching jewelry—but the only thing she'd accumulated since was children. Nothing made Ruth appreciate the existing simplicities of her life like the impending arrival of a new baby, lovable and helpless and full of need, spiraling everything into chaos.

“Spring baby,” Del said, grabbing her hand. “Brand-new when the world is.”

Ruth thought of her other children. Charley, eight years old, sensitive, was prone to tantrums and odd rotating fascinations—cloud formations by day, constellations at night, and now, because it was October, migrating tarantulas. The girls, Nancy and Brenda, seven and six, were all whisper and giggle, the bounce of their pigtails tapping gently, relentlessly, against their delicate shoulders. She loved her kids, but she'd been working to stop at three.

Outside the office, Ruth squinted against the desert sun glare. She considered the dusky greens and deep blues of the mountains outside Tonopah—Mount Butler, Mount Oddie—the subtle complexity of what had seemed, at first, a toasted desert monotone. A few errant cumulus clouds had formed over the mountains, and Ruth, despite her doubts, searched the sky for signs. Catholic school had taught her to imagine the saints sitting on clouds with the well-meaning ghosts of her dead ancestors, watching over her life, offering protection, guidance, intercession. It was both comforting and disconcerting. She wanted to believe in it more than she actually did.

It was hard to accept that the world she'd left—her sisters whispering in her ears, her mother knitting her sweaters—was better than the one she'd run to. She'd been taught all her life that her future was sure to be brighter than her past. But yesterday's future had turned into a vaguely bleak present, which made the past seem especially shiny. In Ruth's daydreams, Colorado was just as she left it. Amber-colored goblets arranged in her mother's kitchen built-ins. An orderly line of three girlish peacoats draped over the mudroom's Shaker pegs. Coffee and Irish cream swirling in milk-glass mugs. In her daydreams, Ruth cooled her bare feet in the South Platte River.