A WEEK PASSED. RUTH was stirring the dinner beans when Charley stumbled into the kitchen of their trailer in Gabbs, pulling her toward the door. “Ma! Come outside! Come see!” Del looked up from the solitaire he'd spread across the gold Formica table, raised an eyebrow.

“Coming,” she said. “Easy.”

Outside, the Shoshone range had gone rosy, reflecting the pastels of the sky. The smell of sage was heavy, the dust baked stale. Her daughters were spinning, singing a song she didn't recognize.

“Do you see the clouds? Mom? Look up!” Charley was yelling. His voice was always louder than the moment demanded. It drew unkind attention from others. A few neighbors stared from their porches, a few darkened their windows. Not all of them went back to minding their own business.

Ruth knelt down to be close to Charley's ear. She felt tense, scrutinized. “You don't need to shout, Charley,” she said. “I'm right here.”

The clouds were like giant discs lying on their sides, stacked in twos and threes in the fading desert light—white tinged with gray, the edges glowing in pinks and oranges.

Charley was still shouting. “Those are alto cumulus standing lenticulars. They're made of gravity waves and wind.” He threw his arms around her neck. “Mom! Wind blows through them at hundreds of miles an hour, and they just stay there, hovering in place. Like spaceships—people used to think they were spaceships.” At least half of Charley's fascination with the sky was the possible alien life that could reside there. Del had encouraged this, his only real point of connection with his son—Del was a scholar of alien abduction, a conspiracy connoisseur. Otherwise, Del seemed baffled by Charley, perpetually annoyed.

Nancy rolled her eyes, whispered to Brenda, who giggled.

“Be nice, girls,” Ruth said, but her daughters were only mirrors of the way the world seemed to react to Charley. It was a small consolation that Charley himself did not register ridicule. Charley radiated his enduring enthusiasm outward into the world despite the world's cold reception.

Ruth flushed, felt saliva fill her mouth, just managed to turn away before she vomited into the sagebrush.

Nancy rubbed her back, pulled a tendril of hair off the side of her neck.

“Hey Charley,” Brenda said, “let's play tarantula race.”