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I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be facetious.” She and I had discussed my worries about Gabe, the strain he’d been under the last few months with his friend’s death in Kansas and now Aaron’s death and how he never spoke of either of them. She viewed his quiet reticence with more dispassion than me. Not only because he wasn’t her husband, but because she was accustomed to the Latino male’s way of handling emotion.
    “He’s reacting exactly how any of my brothers or my dad would,” she assured me. “He’ll come around eventually or work it out in his own way.”
    “He seemed a little more open when we got back from Kansas, then Aaron died, and he’s . . . well, he’s not exactly depressed. It’s just like it never happened. I don’t think holding things in necessarily works them out. I think people need to talk about their feelings.”
    “That’s your Southern background. All you people do is talk. But does it really help? You all are just as crazy as the rest of us.”
    I gave her a weak smile. “Sometimes crazier.”
    She wrinkled her nose delicately, reminding me of a fussy, purebred cat. “Well, I didn’t want to actually say it—”
    “You know as well as I do talking about things is healthier, but I guess you’re right. He’ll come around in his own time. I know when Jack died I didn’t want people poking at me to do things.” I sipped the iced coffee drink the clerk set in front of me. “On the other hand, sometimes it was what I needed, you and Dove pushing me back into life before I thought I wanted to go. A person isn’t always their own best judge of what they need.”
    “Go feed him,” she said, pushing the white sack toward me. “Mama says if you can’t do anything else for a man, you can always feed him.”
    I laughed and stood up. “I love your mama. I need to visit her soon.”
    “This week,” she said firmly. “She’s been complaining about not seeing you enough. Are you going to visit Nick?”
    “Yeah, I’m going to drop by the bakery and get a pie.”
    “Give him my condolences. I’ll send some flowers.” She gathered up her computer printouts and stood up. “I’d better do it now before I forget.”
    “I’ll call you later and let you know what happened.”
    I took my cappuccino over to the counter and asked the clerk to pour it into a paper cup and added a just-baked apple turnover to Gabe’s lunch. As the clerk added it to my tab I heard my name called out over the buzz of the crowd. Peter Grant stood up and waved at me. I grabbed my sack and maneuvered my way through the noisy room to his table.
    Peter and I had known each other most of our lives. His parents once owned one of the largest almond orchards in North County. We met in 4-H and had shared lots of Cokes and baskets of greasy chili fries at the MidState fair while hanging out waiting for our animals to be judged. In college, we took a different route. My major had been American history with a minor in agriculture. His was environmental studies, emphasis on the radical. When his family was forced to sell the orchard after a few bad years and move to San Francisco, Peter remained on the Central Coast. He managed the small mountain sports store he’d worked at since college, taught mountain climbing on the side, and fought passionately for the rights of spotted owls, redwoods, and gray wolves. An avid rock and mountain climber, at thirty-seven he very rarely wore anything but shorts, T-shirts, and hiking boots. He had that yuppie outdoorsy look that, had he been taller, could have made him a lot of money posing for Eddie Bauer catalogs—a trim, muscled body, healthy brown hair, clear brown eyes, skin tanned a glowing ocher. Today he wore a pale tan T-shirt depicting a house with a red circle and slash painted over it and the words SAVE OUR OPEN LANDS. He was at the forefront of the fight for zero development and a permanent greenbelt surrounding San Celina. He’d recently added storytelling to