“The creamed corn can is low?” Sister's laugh was bright, cutting, like she knew something Ruth didn't. “I wish I could help you bring those babies home, Ruth, I do. But you know, vows of poverty. And Mom and Mano are barely getting by as it is.”

Ruth knew what Sister wasn't saying out loud. You made all the decisions that led to this. “I wasn't asking for help.”

“Weren't you?”

Someone Ruth didn't know was waiting outside the phone booth.

“I'd like to get a job, save my own money, but Del's not thrilled with the idea.”

Del had, over the years of their marriage, lost a string of jobs dealing cards at cut-rate Vegas casinos. Not the big names, where he could have made a real living after Paul Anka or Tom Jones shows, but the trashier ones, daylight hours, penny-slot locals feeling flush on payday, a few low-stakes poker hands. Mining would be different, he'd told her, just before he moved the family from Vegas to Gabbs.

“It's 1970, Ruthie,” Del had said, handing her a beer and then clinking his against it, as though she was as thrilled as he was. “New job for a new decade!”

“Plenty of mines in Colorado,” she said. If they were going to leave Vegas, Ruth wanted all of Nevada in the rearview.

Del rolled his eyes, but still they sparkled. He pulled her close, tried to dance her across the kitchen. “You're missing the point, Ruthie. This is ground-floor luck. Magnesium is the mineral of the future!”

The stranger outside the phone booth looked impatient. “Does he have to know?” Sister asked. “About your job?”

Ruth tried to imagine a world in which she could have a secret job. It was ridiculous. Impossible. Sister didn't know anything about husbands. About kids. About the way a family was always around you and on top of you and inside you. About the ways it was possible to be surrounded and loved and crushingly lonely all at the same time.

“What do you mean does he have to know? Where would he think I was?”

“All right.” Ruth heard Sister whisper to someone nearby, but she couldn't make out the words. “But if you found a job, you could tell him you got paid a little less than you did. Set a little by every week.”

“You've got a lot of advice about how to lie,” Ruth said, “for a nun.”

“Would a creamed corn can full of money change Del's mind?”

Recently, Del had started telling stories about the incompetence of his direct supervisor and the generally dirty nature of work in the mine. It was a familiar pattern—complaints about the minutiae of the work, railing against workplace politics. Any day, he'd come home telling her he'd quit on some obscure principle, which would mean, of course, that he'd been canned.