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Findley, of working in one of the better art galleries in Scottsdale and maybe one day running one of her own.
    At the time, though, Richard had gone into business with Charlie Wells and was scrambling to make it work. Money was tight and Evelyn wanted to help, so when the opening at Southwestern Airlines came up, she signed on as a flight attendant.
    Richard went on to turn a haphazardly managed, barely break-even grounds maintenance service into a flourishing, lucrative operation. On the basis of his reputation for solid work and through long hours of canvassing, Richard had put the company in line for a number of long-term contracts with some of the larger resorts and retirement communities in Phoenix. Things were looking up. They bought a house in Encanto Park and eventually traded up to Scottsdale.
    The house had a leviathan-sized mortgage that dwarfed the number of hours and whatever desire she had left for her degree, and Evelyn stayed on with Southwestern Airlines. With each takeoff, landing, and layover, the worlds of Rembrandt and Monet, Degas and Gauguin, shrunk and became convenient icebreakers for conversations at social gatherings and parties.
    Then Richard discovered his partner had gone behind his back and set up a series of price-fixing schemes and rigged bids with their competitors. He’d also, without Richard’s knowledge, begun hiring illegal aliens for some of the ground crew work. Charlie Wells refused to back down or change either of these practices when Richard confronted him, and Richard refused to work with anyone who condoned either one. They ended up dissolving the partnership. With the working capital he managed to salvage, Richard turned around and started Frontier Cleaners. Money again was tight, his hours long, and Evelyn this time left Southwest for United and a better salary and benefits package.
    It didn’t seem too much to ask. After all, Richard’s plans were never just his plans; his plans were for them, the life they were building, the future they were building together.
    The very future she now finds herself in but doesn’t recognize. Or maybe recognizes all too clearly.
    A life that has now come to feel like one of the morning paper crossword puzzles her husband likes to solve.
    Something governed by definitions and whose fit and form only allow you to move in one of two directions.
    Evelyn tears south, passing a white-on-green mileage sign for Coolidge. The sun’s off to her right, a blazing yellow-white hole in the sky.
    Under the right circumstances, decency, she thinks, becomes a burden.
    Under the right circumstances, your plans, she thinks, begin to plan you.
    Until one day, you find yourself sitting across from your husband and he says,
It’s not too late. Thirty-nine’s not too old. Lots of couples wait. You take care of yourself. You’d be a good mother.
    Your husband reaches across the table and takes your hand.
A new life,
he says.
    What you feel, though, is the weight and shape of your own, how you’ve spent your entire life attending to the needs of others—your father’s, your husband’s, those of thousands of strangers on hundreds of flights—and you can’t make your husband understand how the very idea of a child frightens you right now, a new life, a thumbnail of flesh that is pure unadulterated need, feeding on and growing inside you, a relentless presence you carry with you everywhere until it’s ready to drop into your life wailing and grasping, all mouth and fingers, and you become the center of another cycle of need.
    A family, a child,
your husband says,
they make sense of things.
    But you don’t want to make a child or sense right now.
    You want to take off your panties and drive as fast as you can through the desert.
    You want the flat, hard light, the wind, a landscape that promises nothing beyond itself.
    Right now, you want the sun to burn you clean of everything, even decency.
    But what you want more than anything else is simply this: to