Read The Long Fall for Free Online Page A

she whips into the lot of a convenience store that’s dressed up as a hacienda. She leaves the Mustang running and strides inside. A thin film of perspiration rides her hairline and neck, and she feels it lift from her skin in the arctic blast of air conditioning. She’s the only customer in the store.
    On impulse, imagining her husband’s frown, Evelyn buys a single tallboy beer and then a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.
    Back outside, she unsnaps and folds down the ragtop on the Mustang and gets behind the wheel again. She listens to the engine idling, feels its vibrations through the floorboard. She slips her hand beneath her skirt, catches the hem of her panties, and peels them down her legs and off, wadding and stuffing them in her purse before backing up and pulling out on 87 again.
    Farther south the landscape begins to flatten and open up, mile upon mile of desert hardpan broken only by mesquite, creosote, and brittlebush, elephant trees, crucifixion thorn, and ironwood, lingering pockets of fading wildflowers, and scattered cacti standing like stranded chess pieces or misplaced coat racks.
    Evelyn opens the tallboy and takes a long swallow. The wind rips through her hair, and the air streaming through the vents lifts and fills her skirt. She sets the beer between her legs. The inside of her thighs ripple in a long shudder when the can touches them.
    She punches through the radio until she finds KZON. She wants something loud, harsh, and hormonal, songs stripped and raw, full of the blunt crazed grace of those too young to understand anything beyond what they feel.
    She takes another swallow of beer. Rimming the far western horizon, the South Mountains and a couple of bumps beyond them, the Estrella Mountains, slowly recede every time she presses the gas, space begetting space, endlessly filling itself.
    To the east a small dust storm churns and rises in the flat afternoon light.
    The wind screams. She turns up the radio. She tries to remember the last time she heard her husband laugh.
    He’s a good man. He is. And she loves him. Evelyn just wishes she could remember something that had made him laugh, but she can’t.
    She pushes the Mustang through the flat, hard light. The condensation on the beer can trickles down the inside of her thighs.
    Making a bet with herself, she drives with her eyes closed until the count of seven. Then on impulse counts out three more.
    When she opens her eyes, she sees a jackrabbit flash through the underbrush.
    She passes a stretch of blackened ground, the charred stumps of saguaro cacti that have become inadvertent lightning rods from the late spring storms.
    She closes her eyes, counts again.
    She’s spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father had been one. Everyone said so. He’d been a high school math teacher, and while her father may have found what he needed to negotiate his life in the truths governing quadratic equations and logarithms, he was totally helpless in the face of the everyday workings of the world. Her mother left when Evelyn turned twelve, and Evelyn stepped in and managed the household, doing all the cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, the shopping and writing out of the monthly bills. She stayed at home, taking care of things, through high school and her first two years at Arizona State.
    Where she met, fell in love with, and married Richard Coates.
    Another good, decent man. Albeit a different one from her father.
    Richard was passionate, at home in the world, full of plans. That’s what had initially drawn her to him—his unwavering belief and confidence, lacking even a shred of arrogance, that he could accomplish whatever he set out to do. He knew how things worked. He was optimistic without being naive, principled and ambitious, fair in his treatment of others.
    Evelyn dropped out of ASU at the close of her junior year. She’d been an art history major with secondhand plans that she’d borrowed from her best friend, Carol