She finished a row of the afghan and started another.
The prospects arrived at noon the next day in a battered pickup, two of them, young enough that Miriam's first thought was that somebody's mother was going to worry. The taller one — Jace, twenty-three, earnest as a puppy — introduced himself with a handshake so careful it was almost apologetic. The other, a wiry kid the club called Preach on account of he never stopped talking about his grandmother's church, carried a duffel and a sleeping bag and the look of a boy trying very hard to seem older than he was.
Mr. Thornton sent us, ma'am, Jace said. "We're to — uh. We're to keep an eye on the place."
Miriam looked at them. Then she looked at the pickup. Then she looked back at them, and whatever she was about to say died unsaid, because at that exact moment Eli Thornton's Harley rolled up the dirt road in a plume of dust, and the president himself dismounted and walked up to her porch like a man approaching a judge.
Morning, ma'am, he said.
Don't you ma'am me, Miriam said. "Get up here."
He climbed the steps. The two prospects stood at parade rest by the pickup, trying to be invisible and failing.
You posted guards on me, Miriam said. It was not a question.
Yes, ma'am.
Two children with peach fuzz.
They're twenty-three and twenty-five, ma'am, and Jace did two tours —
I don't care if they did twelve tours. Miriam planted her hands on her hips. Barnaby, sensing the theater of it, sat down beside her and growled softly for effect. "Elias Thornton, I am seventy-one years old. I have been shot at by professionals, I have buried a husband, I have outlived a war and a well pump and eleven years of this desert trying to kill me with boredom. I do not need babysitters. I need you to find the man who put that note on my porch and put him where he can't write any more of them."
Eli listened to all of it without blinking. Then he said, quietly, "Yes, ma'am. We're working on that. But until we do — they're staying. Not negotiable."
Miriam glared at him. He glared back, gently. It was, she realized with irritation, exactly the expression Amos used to wear when he had decided something for her own good and knew she would hate him for it for exactly eleven minutes.
Fine, she said. "They stay on the porch. They don't come in the house unless invited, they don't touch my truck, and they don't scare Barnaby."
Yes, ma'am.
And Eli. She fixed him with the look that had once made corpsmen move faster. "You find him."
We will.
She fed them anyway. Of course she fed them. By six o'clock there was a pot of stew on the stove big enough to drown in, and a pan of biscuits, and Jace and Preach were sitting on her porch steps with bowls balanced on their knees, eating like they'd been starved, while Barnaby supervised for dropped morsels. Miriam watched from the doorway with her arms crossed and told herself she was only being practical — a fed guard was an alert guard — and ignored the warm, traitorous feeling spreading under her ribs.
You boys call your mothers? she asked.
Yes, ma'am, they said in unison, mouths full.
Good. Eat your carrots.
That night the wind came up, rattling the loose shutter on the back bedroom, and Miriam lay awake listening to the murmur of the two young men on her porch and the tick of the cooling stove. At some point past midnight Barnaby lifted his head from the foot of her bed, stared at the dark window, and growled — low, continuous, certain.
Miriam reached for the shotgun leaning against the nightstand. She did not turn on the light. She sat in the dark with the Ithaca across her lap and listened to her dog growl at something out there beyond the porch light, something in the sagebrush dark that did not belong.
*Stay out of it, old woman.*
No, she whispered to the dark. "I don't think I will."
The growling went on a long time before it faded. Miriam stayed awake until dawn.
The clinic in Ely smelled the way all hospitals smelled — bleach and old coffee and the particular tiredness of people who worked while the rest of the world slept. Miriam had come to hate that smell in Da Nang and had never quite stopped hating it, but she drove the forty-five minutes into town every day anyway, because there was a young woman in room six with a bandaged leg and a ventilator's rhythm, and somebody ought to sit with her.
The club had posted its own guards at the clinic — Sarge Dillard by day, a rotation of patched members by night, all of them large and silent and faintly absurd among the pastel waiting-room chairs. They nodded to Miriam when she arrived each morning with her tote bag and her thermos, and she nodded back, and an understanding had formed without anyone discussing it: she was allowed past the door because she had earned it on Highway 50.
On the fourth day, she brought wildflowers. Desert paintbrush, orange as embers, gathered from the wash behind her house where the spring runoff had been generous. She put them in a paper cup on the bedside table, arranging them the way Amos had once arranged tools on his workbench — with unnecessary precision.
Morning, Jessie, she said to the sleeping woman. "It's Miriam. The old woman from the highway. Don't worry, I'm not here to fuss. I'm just going to sit."
The machines breathed. The monitors ticked. Jessie's face, scrubbed clean of dust and blood, was younger than Miriam had guessed that night — twenty-nine, Eli had said, and it showed now in the smooth brow, the faint freckles across the nose. The wedding ring was back on her left hand. Eli had put it there himself, Miriam had heard, sliding it on while the nurses pretended not to watch.