“Once in your lifetime, maybe,” Mano countered. She was thirty-three years old, nine years younger than Ruth, had every intention of living the seventy-five years it would take to see the comet again in 2061. When she saw Ruth start to argue, Mano cut her off. “You don't know how the world will change any more than I do. Maybe we'll all live longer than we think.” She said this more to argue than because she believed it. Mano kept up with the news, read her horoscopes. When examined with any honesty, all future indicators were bleak. And then there were the dead fish. Mano made the other half of her living manning the reception desk at the city of Loveland's water treatment facility. Two days before, there had been a massive fish kill in the river, and while it was still officially an unsolved mystery, Mano was pretty sure that Keith, her boss, and Lloyd, his boss, knew something she didn't.

Ruth pursed her lips and looked back up at the sky. Mano felt the roof solid underneath her. The house was well built, sturdy, and the family shifted in and out of its shelter as needed. Their father had passed years ago, and then their mother. After that, Ruth and her four kids had come back to Colorado, moved in with Mano. Teresa, who had become Sister Agnes Mary, who lived now in the church annex downtown, who taught kindergarten at St. Paul's, stopped by when she could for coffee, for a few hands of rummy. Three of Ruth's four kids had grown and flown since then; the last, Chris, sixteen, emerged from the basement only occasionally, for snacks. Mano had moved out too, after her wedding the previous summer.

“I saw Rick in line for confession earlier,” Ruth said, “but I didn't see you. I thought he'd come with you tonight.” Ruth looked away from the sky to stare at Mano. Behind her, Mano saw a new silhouette—a trout curving mid-glide. She wondered what, exactly, Rick had confessed.

Mano had knelt with Rick in front of the altar at St. Paul's Catholic Church, had made a number of promises she had, at that time, fully planned to keep. Rick, also, had seemed sincere. Rick was even more obsessed with Stevie Nicks than she was, and in those early summer months of their marriage he'd loved to watch Mano undress to the early version of “Sorcerer” from his 1974 Buckingham-Nicks demo. Mano would move like the white-winged dove, building intensity with the music, and always, after, Rick lay on his belly, turned his face toward hers, draped his arm across the soft skin of her chest as they both drifted into sleep. But the marriage had flashed hot, cooled quickly. Mano knew she was no longer the only woman lying naked with Rick, smoking cigarettes, listening to “Wild Heart.”