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became increasingly frantic, and now the patient had a real incision, but this last-ditch surgery was nothing like that television show on Thursday nights. Lily couldn’t understand why Blaise had loved to watch it. Medical scenarios made for compelling anecdotes, but those episodes were about actors reenacting real-life tragic events. She bowed her head, wanting to say a prayer, but beyond Santa María, madre del Creador , a phrase she’d

    memorized at the age of eight only in a futile attempt to please her grandmother—who always favored Rose—she couldn’t remember the words.
    The heart monitor was flat, and had been for forty-five minutes. The sound of surgical gloves snapping off filled the air. The patient lay dead on the table, the airway tube sticking out of her mouth like an albino snake.
    The anesthesiologist ripped his mask from his face. “Call it, Charles. Just fucking call it so we can get out of here.”
    “Time of death,” the surgeon announced. “Eleven fifty-two A.M. ”

    Lily filled out her paperwork with trembling hands. It wasn’t the first time that a patient had died in her presence, but this time it shouldn’t have happened. Her company would throw this fiasco to the corporate lawyers, and probably nothing would come of it be- sides a cash settlement, but Lily would never be able to forget it. The bottom line was that the inept surgeon would still get paid, not to mention go on to operate again. He could live with killing people even if Lily could not.

    She turned off the radio and drove the speed limit all the way out to the stables. Once there, she couldn’t seem to make her legs stop shaking. What in hell was she thinking, going riding in a straight skirt? She waved to the rental guy, turned her car around, and stopped at Cook’s Corner, the last of Orange County’s true road- houses. Now it was a trendy place to go country-and-western dan- cing, frequented by a few authentic bikers and far too many aspiring ones. She and Blaise had danced there a couple of times. She ordered a Corona and fries. At the furthest picnic table out behind the saloon, she sat pinching the greasy potatoes into inch-long segments, feeding them one by one to the crows. Like teenage boys dressed in dark clothing, they fought and scrapped over every single piece. They tore feathers from one another to get to the food, but half the time they didn’t even eat what they’d won. She wondered if they had avian MBAs, or drove Dodge Vipers, or called their girlfriends fucking bitches.
    There was a time in her life, not so very long ago, when leasing the luxury car, owning her own condo, and pulling down 150 grand a year seemed like the perfect plan. All that college, which at the time seemed so annoyingly tedious, had finally parlayed into something functional.

    She had a fat 401K, a stock portfolio with bloodlines like one of her father’s best horses, investments that were paying off her mortgage. From her family’s viewpoint she was successful and had moved up in the world. How many thirty-five-year-old women could say that? Certainly not the one lying on the morgue table. Lily shuddered. But the last couple of years, what with Rose not speaking to her, Southern California going down the toilet—the crowds, the cost of living, and men like Blaise—as her pop used to say, Lily, my darling, this does not look like a path even a mule could hack .
    She watched the assortment of leather-clad bikers down their bottles of American brew. They didn’t fool her into believing they were outlaws. Leather and sunglasses and those imposing, pointless silver chains: They wore uniforms as blatant as any Catholic schoolgirl’s. One tough old broad, as weathered as beef jerky, stood under an awning by the creek entrance selling jewelry. Her skin under the leather vest was so tan that Lily wanted to walk over and deliver a lecture on melanoma. Not today, though. Today she couldn’t even tell herself what to do. Speaking of