Then it all surges up in a ball into my throat. I clap both hands over my mouth, but it comes out anyway, in waves so strong they feel like they’ll break my ribs. I sound like I’m throwing up, but I can’t stop it. He puts his hands on my shoulders, and I lean against the faded blue of his T-shirt. His presence makes it all real again. He makes her real again.

I’m not sure if I cry for ten minutes or ten hours. When I stop, the world looks newly washed and so beautiful that it’s unbearable to look at. Past the edge of the development, Mizerak’s corn is about a foot high. For a second, the world comes back to me the way it felt when Grimshaw was alive. Suddenly, I can almost see her walking toward me through her favorite crop, a girl who wanted what she wasn’t supposed to have, which was her own life. I don’t know how long I’ve been crying, but apparently it was enough to clear out the backyard. I look around the remains of my party. It sounds like the guests have gone to the other side of the house.

I look into Bo’s face. “Where’s your truck?”

“I lost my truck.”

“No truck?”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t make payments and repairs,” he explains. “One or the other I could swing, but that truck was old. I ain’t a crack-shot mechanic to keep it runnin’ on a dime.”

Those trucks are high-shouldered buffalo roaming the paths of the prairie in single file. At night herds of them sleep together in parking lots, keeping the West alive. Bo doesn’t have one anymore, though. He walks like a cowboy, but he isn’t one. Ain’t one. The truth is puny, next to the romantic version, but it has more possibilities.

“If I could have driven twenty-four hours a day, I could have done it,” he says. “But—they don’t let you do that.”

His hat is now folded up and stuck into the back pocket of his jeans. I take it out. It’s the same one he was wearing in the parking lot in Boomtown, Nevada.

“‘If it ain’t a cat it’s a dog,’” I read.

Bo nods gravely. “Words to live by.” For some reason, that makes me laugh, and that feels familiar, too, like it is something I used to do, and I didn’t know my face would still remember how to do it, and then I start crying again.

Eventually, I take his hand. “Thanks for coming.” It comes out in a whisper.

“It’s okay.”