nose, had a comfortingly new, mildly chemical smell. She closed her eyes as Paul patted their daughters’ backs and hummed “Home on the Range” until they all dozed off to sleep.
—
I T WAS STILL DARK when Nat awoke. A piece of carpet fuzz tickled her mouth. She sat up, her eyes adjusting, and tried to judge the depth of the girls’ sleep by their soft, mouthy breaths.
She wandered into the living room, taking small steps to avoid stumbling into boxes. Not finding Paul, she backtracked to look for him in their bedroom. Blankets were spread on the floor but he wasn’t there. She had no idea what time it was. Outside, the toads trilled in cascades, each note strung like an identical pearl on the wave of sound.
She followed their song to the backyard where she spied Paul sitting on the small square of moonlit patio. He sat with his ankles crossed, looking into the distance.
The patio ended abruptly at his feet and the yard turned to dark grass, just enough to cross in three or four strides before they reached their neighbors’ backyards. Waist-high brown picket fences ran between. All the neighbors’ windows were dark, and as her eyes settled she could see between the houses into a far-off blank area unmarred by billboard or streetlight. Only the sloping forms of mountains were visible, darkness against darkness, a shadow of a dream.
Idaho Falls was no San Diego, but it wasn’t the worst place, either. Just remote was all, a little outpost with an attention-getting namesake: the man-made waterfall that marked the entrance to town on the banks of the Snake River. Nat thought of the first day they’d driven into town, a few weeks earlier. Like the town itself, the falls were clean and tidy and gave no trouble. They zigzagged the river at well-planned right angles and spilled about twenty feet down to the rocks, the water pouring so neatly that it barely frothed—it seemed to be made of silk. Even the misty boulders at the bottom appeared to have been hand-arranged by fastidious town fathers.
Above the falls stood the Mormon temple, tiered up to the top in rectangular layers like a masculine interpretation of a wedding cake. A single golden archangel posed on top, holding a thin instrument to his lips as if he were blowing glass. The falls and the temple: You could hardly picture one without the other. They were so pristine, so lushly manufactured in contrast to the quiet, two-dog town and endless desert beyond, that they were almost startling to come upon.
Past the falls and the temple there was a tiny downtown, a strip of Main Street with a barbershop, a candy store, a diner, and a brand-spanking-new J.C. Penney. After that, a few tire rotations’ worth of neighborhoods, and then the landscape went briefly back to fields again—Mormon farmland, mostly potatoes—and finally the endless-looking desert, as brown and rough as sandpaper. Fifty miles west of town, over more blank desert, was the National Reactor Testing Station where Paul worked.
She wondered how he liked his new job. When she asked him how it was going, he usually said “fine” or, occasionally, “decent.” He was not a complainer, which other wives had told her she should be grateful for, but she wouldn’t have minded a few more details.
Watching him, apprehension hung in her chest like a swallowed chip of ice. The past month had been one trial after another. There was the dumb little number she’d pulled at the lake just before they reached Idaho Falls, diving into the water even though he had asked her not to. That seemed like ages ago. Before that argument had resolved itself he was off to his new job, and when he was at home he was either lost in the sleep of the dead or rummaging among their vaguely marked boxes in a futile, exhausting search for one item or another.
“Paul, where is the hand mixer? Have you seen the box with the spare linens? You didn’t happen across my Dutch oven, did you?”
They had gone whole days without
—
I T WAS STILL DARK when Nat awoke. A piece of carpet fuzz tickled her mouth. She sat up, her eyes adjusting, and tried to judge the depth of the girls’ sleep by their soft, mouthy breaths.
She wandered into the living room, taking small steps to avoid stumbling into boxes. Not finding Paul, she backtracked to look for him in their bedroom. Blankets were spread on the floor but he wasn’t there. She had no idea what time it was. Outside, the toads trilled in cascades, each note strung like an identical pearl on the wave of sound.
She followed their song to the backyard where she spied Paul sitting on the small square of moonlit patio. He sat with his ankles crossed, looking into the distance.
The patio ended abruptly at his feet and the yard turned to dark grass, just enough to cross in three or four strides before they reached their neighbors’ backyards. Waist-high brown picket fences ran between. All the neighbors’ windows were dark, and as her eyes settled she could see between the houses into a far-off blank area unmarred by billboard or streetlight. Only the sloping forms of mountains were visible, darkness against darkness, a shadow of a dream.
Idaho Falls was no San Diego, but it wasn’t the worst place, either. Just remote was all, a little outpost with an attention-getting namesake: the man-made waterfall that marked the entrance to town on the banks of the Snake River. Nat thought of the first day they’d driven into town, a few weeks earlier. Like the town itself, the falls were clean and tidy and gave no trouble. They zigzagged the river at well-planned right angles and spilled about twenty feet down to the rocks, the water pouring so neatly that it barely frothed—it seemed to be made of silk. Even the misty boulders at the bottom appeared to have been hand-arranged by fastidious town fathers.
Above the falls stood the Mormon temple, tiered up to the top in rectangular layers like a masculine interpretation of a wedding cake. A single golden archangel posed on top, holding a thin instrument to his lips as if he were blowing glass. The falls and the temple: You could hardly picture one without the other. They were so pristine, so lushly manufactured in contrast to the quiet, two-dog town and endless desert beyond, that they were almost startling to come upon.
Past the falls and the temple there was a tiny downtown, a strip of Main Street with a barbershop, a candy store, a diner, and a brand-spanking-new J.C. Penney. After that, a few tire rotations’ worth of neighborhoods, and then the landscape went briefly back to fields again—Mormon farmland, mostly potatoes—and finally the endless-looking desert, as brown and rough as sandpaper. Fifty miles west of town, over more blank desert, was the National Reactor Testing Station where Paul worked.
She wondered how he liked his new job. When she asked him how it was going, he usually said “fine” or, occasionally, “decent.” He was not a complainer, which other wives had told her she should be grateful for, but she wouldn’t have minded a few more details.
Watching him, apprehension hung in her chest like a swallowed chip of ice. The past month had been one trial after another. There was the dumb little number she’d pulled at the lake just before they reached Idaho Falls, diving into the water even though he had asked her not to. That seemed like ages ago. Before that argument had resolved itself he was off to his new job, and when he was at home he was either lost in the sleep of the dead or rummaging among their vaguely marked boxes in a futile, exhausting search for one item or another.
“Paul, where is the hand mixer? Have you seen the box with the spare linens? You didn’t happen across my Dutch oven, did you?”
They had gone whole days without
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