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years waiting for the knock. The man was still staring. What did the bandanna mean? The leather vest? The Santa Fe passed and there were the empty rails.
    He was dark as adobe, this staring man. But still an American. And she had sighed. Flagstaff was higher than six thousand feet, the signs said. It would be cold. There would be snow. Deep snow covering the red pine dust. Star-shaped lion footprints coming out of the rocks. Over the crossing she could see a sign for the Lumberjack Café.
    Looks like you could do with a drink, the man had said. Poco aqua?
    Yes, she had replied. I’m thirsty. Because by then if she knew anything at all she knew there was no turning back. And beyond Flagstaff there was nowhere. Or nowhere big enough to get lost and still survive.
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    What she’s driving is a powder-blue Civic with red primer patches. Up in Flagstaff it would have rusted through by now, but, as she always said, Phoenix was bone dry. Not as dry as where she came from, but getting there.
    A woman she knows in the nursing home had told her she should fly. ‘Not to go nowhere. Just to see the swimming pools.’
    Apparently landing and taking off in Phoenix was some experience. A thousand, ten thousand swimming pools were strung out like Zuni turquoise. Like jays’ feathers in the dust.
    She’d never asked Frank what he was doing at the rail station. Old man had he been? Sort of. If the Luckies hadn’t killed him, he’d be seventy now. Lean and red with a little pot belly.
    And now it was her turn to be fifty. Only a little younger than the man who had picked her up on the platform. She could remember him pouring iced water in the Lumberjack and buying hotcakes, the syrup in a little jug. That night he left a spot of bloody drool on their shared pillow, his rifle standing in the corner.
    Of course, she hadn’t loved him. But there were times when she thought she might. Down in Cottonwood once they had danced to a bar band and some boy at the counter made a remark. Wetback, was it? She knew the word but had never heard it said. Not like that. And never about her. Maybe it was went back? Yes, that was it.
    With dignity, Frank had told her they were leaving. Going home to the house in the trees. That there was no point. Let this one go, he said. They had other troubles to meet.
    Yes, she had loved him then. His silver hair and a different bandanna. Kate, the bar owner, stayed silent and watched them go. The familiar betrayal. Yet what was Frank but a man looking around that bar and noticing, maybe for the first time, how the world had changed. And making the best of it. Facing it with the courage he could muster. Because when a man’s time has gone that’s all a man can do.
    The young drinker had smiled at the room with both elbows on the bar. The stance that meant he owned it now. Owned the time. And Frank, humiliated in his heart but not in hers, coughed as they drove north. How their shadows had swung when at last the oil lantern was lit, the darknesses full of coyotes yapping and some kids driving pickups down the loggers’ road.
    She had all those years in that cabin and each day the black and white TV flickered in the kitchen. The Osmonds. Richard Nixon. And the Cardinals, the Cardinals who played all the time, and one day were miraculously red.
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    Hey Maria?
    Hey, she said.
    Buenos dias.
    Hey, she said again.
    No rest for the wicked.
    I’m not that wicked.
    You on afternoons all week?
    Yes.
    It’s not so bad.
    No.
    They say it’ll hit 100 today.
    Oh boy.
    See you inside.
    Okay.
    The Sunset was one of the smaller nursing homes in that part of the state. It had been bulldozed out of the hillside south of Black Canyon City, and yes, the evenings could be spectacular, black shapes of the saguaros against the orange sky, and then the town lights pricking the rapid nightfall.
    Maria had worked there ten years, starting one year after the Sunset opened. Long enough for