He thought about Stone's offer, and suddenly he wanted more than anything to unlock the unlikely chimes of Mandy's laughter, see her smile at the cheerful tittering of house finches, the smell of spruce through the open window. Rig life and marriage were the same. During boom times, everyone made bets about when the bust would happen, and during the bust, it was hard to believe there would ever be another boom. He wished he could scare his past self into the moment, like Marley to Scrooge, make his past self kinder in the face of Mandy's sinking sadness. Joe as the ghost of his own empty future. Joe lost.

Joe forced himself to give the job his attention. I'll get just as sloppy as Dustin. All of the site activity was hidden from view by giant water tanks. It was an unspoken rule that the rigs should be hidden as much as possible—not, of course, that the company had anything to hide. In this case, Joe wondered whose view they were worrying about, as this particular site was so remote they hadn't seen any sign of humanity since they turned off the state highway miles back. The truck convoys hauling water were one of the most visible things for local people to object to . . . so much traffic on once-sleepy rural roads. But he knew it would be worse if the entire drilling process was so tangible. What the public could see, the flare burning off the emissions, the giant drill rig, the twenty-four-hour spotlights, was upsetting enough, but the invisible turmoil underneath it all—underground explosives, chemical soup, toxic gases—was far more frightening.

His mother's face had been that same kind of façade—a mask of false serenity, her anger at being left to raise Joe alone always simmering somewhere beneath it. He'd realized too late, after he left home too, how heartbreakingly lonely the eerie calm of the house must have been for her. He remembered himself, a frightened ten-year-old, asking her about the erections he had started getting on a regular basis. During math class. On the school bus. Riding his bike. His father years gone by then, he'd had no one else to ask.

“What's happening? Am I okay?” His mother had been scrubbing dishes with a sour-smelling sponge. Her yellow rubber-gloved hand had slowed only for a moment, her grip almost imperceptibly tightening.

“Of course you're okay,” she had said, refusing eye contact. “Just don't think about it and it will go away.”