Okay, she’s letting them go.
Meg and Richard waited, expecting to hear the okay. Zack had a different notion.
“Amy!” he cried. “Amy!”
Amy. When they ran in her direction, it was toward the silence.
Home is where the memories are.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
The Avalon Theater, built as an opera house just as vaudeville was expiring, had devolved into a movie theater before being abandoned by a bankrupt cinema chain. After community efforts had failed to revive the building as a performing arts center, the Avalon stood as a city-owned monument to stalemate, too treasured to level and too costly to renovate. In the lobby, the scholarship kids ignored their parents and dribbled salsa on the carpet. Teachers, out of habit, scanned for trouble. Businessmen thumped each other’s backs, their accessory wives already in the auditorium, saving seats and clutching purses they dared not set on the gummy floor. Meg lingered under the marquee glow with the stragglers measuring their pre-event cigarettes. Eve Winslow had promised to meet her, but Meg understood that Eve might be playing mayor at the hospital tonight.
At least Meg had not seen the worst of it, only Amy on the ground and the rusty truck wheel above her quivering from a cable like some malevolent sputnik. Richard Diaz stopped Meg and told her to call 911. Zack and Richard worked to stabilize Amy, while she went out to direct the EMTs back to the scene. Amy was alive when they took her out. All Meg had heard since was a brief news report and angry accusations on talk radio.
This event was difficult enough, watching another girl accept her sister’s memorial scholarship, celebrating one’s potential while being reminded of another’s loss. She wasn’t going to be pathetic about being stood up. She’d give Eve a few more minutes before chancing a run past Senator Pinecone, camped at the entrance. The former state senator turned clean coal lobbyist had just snared a banker with a handshake only a check could uncouple.
Her phone vibrated, the call from Jay DeWitt, a hotshot hospital executive from back east. After viewing at least thirty homes, DeWitt and his wife decided to build. The lot they’d recently closed on posed some challenges but its view overlooking the city was stunning.
“Did you get my texts?”
“Just opening them now, Jay.”
“Well, take a look. It’s a travesty!”
A photo of four large dirt mounds. The second shot showed the piles from a different angle. Another offered a close-up.
“I’m not sure I see what’s going on here.” She didn’t do dirt, she sold houses.
“It was supposed to be clean fill. The loads don’t match—brown, putty-colored, tan. This last one they delivered is pinkish and chunky, like somebody shelled shrimp in a sand box.”
“It obviously came from different sites around the valley. Clean means it’s not polluted, that’s all. It’s just compaction fill. It doesn’t have to match.” She took a deep breath. Jesus. Artisanal fill. “What would you like me to do?”
“You sold us the lot. You found us the builder. You fix it.”
At least DeWitt had called her instead of raining down on the contractor, whose relationship was more important to her long term. Imported jerks like DeWitt tended to depart suddenly with enemies and severance packages, and his new house might be on the market before too long. To keep the door open, Meg left him with assurances she hoped sounded more cheerful than they felt.
The morning’s trauma had drained her reserves. No more multitasking. Though it went against her grain, she set her phone to Do Not Disturb and slipped it in her bag. She had meant to bring her brightest, most vivacious self here, but in the lobby glass she saw a gypsy woman exhausted after a long day of telling fortunes. Pairing jangly beaded earrings with a messy bun pulled up in a silk scarf wasn’t such a festive disguise after all. Out in public, it took effort to maintain the super agent vibe when she disliked makeup and didn’t look like Norah Jones to start with. Clients expected to meet the woman in the photo on her website, the one whose headshot leapt out of the real estate section filled with agents posing confidently in their big hair and statement necklaces. She had spent two hours getting ready for her first photoshoot and another two under the lights, only to look like someone she had never seen before, had never been. The agency ran with the shot until she went off on her own and replaced it with something more realistic, more Grand Junction and less Palm Beach, but still stylish and warm and energetic and savvy. Meg Mogrin reduced to a one-inch thumbnail. That picture was always in her head somewhere, the standard, the summation, the brand. But it was nowhere on her face tonight.
“You here solo?” a voice purred and an arm looped through hers. She turned into the piano-key grin of Donnie Barclay. Donnie glowed like someone half-famous, a second-rung character actor on his way to Telluride. Some moneyed people cultivated the blazer, boots and Levis look. Meg suspected Donnie merely lost interest in dressing up halfway down. Either way, it served his purpose. Without changing his costume, he could play the ranching patriarch with a little sideline gravel business or the prosperous entrepreneur who still clung to the old family homestead.
“I was supposed to meet Eve,” said Meg. “Something must’ve come up.”
“Oh, you know how that goes.” Donnie knew how everything went. “Eve runs behind ’cause it filters out the weak and the impatient.”
He squeezed her arm against his ribs and leaned in so close Meg could smell wintergreen on his breath. Donnie wasn’t a flirt. He was interested in information. “Do you need to wait? I was hoping you could be my protector tonight.”
“From Toby?” Toby Conifer, Senator Pinecone’s proper name.
“From embarrassment. Toby’s let the kooks get to him. Used to be you could count on him to support ranching and drilling and stay-out-of-my-wallet. Now he wants to be sheriff and thinks we should run the county like its own damn country. Which I guess you can, if you like living in the eighteenth century. I need to find me another Republican.”
“Well, that shouldn’t be hard around here,” she said.
Donnie flicked his chaw into a waste bin. “He’s just started to tell a dirty joke. Let’s dive in while we have an opening.” They slipped through the entry, leaving the senator to wave a futile limb. “Now we gotta get past the lady from the history farm. Look at me like you’re fascinated as hell.”
He had cheered her up already. “Maybe you should’ve brought Terri with you if you need protection so badly.”
“Oh, Terri hates this shit. People who want to kiss my ass are always kissing hers just in case. The history farm wants Barclay Paving to buy some old Gilsonite mining cars for an interpretive asphalt exhibit, whatever the hell that is. I think it’s just a way to get a choo-choo train for the school kids.”
“Kids need to learn about our agricultural heritage.”
“I’m sure. But I already spend a ton to preserve it”—he winked—“every year I hang onto the ranch. You coming up this year?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You can’t work all the time. You gotta have some
