in him? he asked himself for the thousandth time.
All his adult life, Chuck had found peace in being alone—so much so, in fact, that before Janelle had come along he’d regularly gone days at a time without speaking to anyone. He’d enjoyed his solitary life right up to the evening when, upon meeting Janelle at her parents’ house, the calm in his head had been replaced by the combustive mix of ardor and trepidation that, at this point, was on the verge of driving him crazy.
He had no idea what he’d done to deserve this beguiling young woman who had materialized in his life, nor did he know how Janelle had come to trust him enough to allow him to join her in raising her two girls. He worried about missteps he might take that would result in his newfound joy vanishing, and wondered how, having experienced the thrill of his new life with Janelle and the girls, he could go back to his old life if that were to happen.
Deep down, he was convinced he risked scaring Janelle away if she ever realized how much he loved her. How could she not be frightened off when the love he felt for her was threatening to scare him away, to send him running from the museum this very instant?
Janelle tugged at his hand, and he forced a smile. “We’re here all right,” he said, his words guarded. He cursed to himself, knowing his uncertainty was visible in his eyes. “The Grand Canyon.”
Janelle’s eyes narrowed. Without a word, she let go of his hand and set off down the hallway after the girls.
Chuck gathered himself and followed. He would catch up with her and take her in his arms, tell her how fortunate he knew he was, how much he loved and cared for her. But he was still trailing her when she spun to face him in the middle of the corridor, causing other museum-goers to alter course as they passed. He avoided her eyes as he approached.
“Look at me,” Janelle said.
He stopped in front of her and offered her an uneasy glance before looking past her at Carmelita and Rosie, still making their way down the passageway.
“Look . . . at . . . me,” Janelle repeated.
He did as told. Seconds ago, her mouth had been relaxed, her eyes warm and inviting. Now, every muscle in her face was tight, her eyes burning into him.
“I love what we’ve got going between us. You have to believe that,” she said. “But I have to be sure you’re with me on this. I already placed my trust in someone by mistake. You know that. I can’t let it happen again. I won’t let it happen again. Not to me, and not to Carm and Rosie.”
Chuck opened his mouth, then closed it.
“Maybe I should have figured this out earlier—like, before we got married,” Janelle went on, her voice softening. “But I’m doing the best I can here. And what I’m saying is, you have to be all the way in on this with me. No halfway about it. You don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve it.” Her lower lip trembled. “And the girls . . . the girls . . . they don’t deserve it either.” Her voice shook. “I don’t need a pretend husband, Chuck. I need the real thing. I can’t stand by and let the girls grow close to you just to risk having you walk away from them.”
“I—” Chuck began, but Janelle wasn’t finished.
“There’s a time limit on this thing,” she said, her voice steadying. “I don’t know how long, exactly. But there has to be, for the girls, for me. You have to come around for the three of us. All the way around. And you have to do it soon.”
With that, she turned and headed down the corridor after her daughters.
2 p.m.
Chuck shuffled down the passageway behind Janelle.
A time limit, she’d said.
She was headstrong, impetuous. She’d probably just been blowing off steam. Still, her comment filled him with dread because he knew she was right. Did he have it in him to do what she needed, what he himself knew he had to do, if their brand-new marriage was to last?
Rosie came charging back up the corridor. She darted around her mother, took hold of Chuck’s wrist with both hands, and dragged him past Janelle toward a darkened doorway off to one side.
“You gotta see, you gotta see,” she exclaimed gleefully, tugging him through the entry into a windowless, cave-like room lit only by black lights directed at luminescent specimens of hackmanite collected from Meteor Crater, a fifty-thousand-year-old, five-hundred-foot-deep asteroid-impact depression in the high desert east of Flagstaff.
Rosie pranced around the dark room, giggling at the way the cream-colored piping on her blouse glowed beneath the black lights. “Look at me!” she cried out.
Carmelita entered the room behind Chuck and Rosie. As she took in the spectacle of her sister dancing and spinning across the floor between the specimen cases, she smiled, her teeth shining as brightly as the luminescent rocks on display. “This is so cool,” she said to Rosie. Catching sight of Chuck looking on, she clamped her mouth shut. Even from across the room, her disdain for him was evident. She turned her back on him and left.
This didn’t surprise Chuck. Where Rosie had taken instantly to him, Carmelita consistently turned a cold shoulder his way—perhaps wisely so, he chastised himself, given what Janelle had said to him in the museum corridor. Carmelita shared Janelle’s striking beauty, same dark hair, heart-shaped face, and smooth olive skin. It was in her eyes that she differed most from her mother; where Janelle’s were warm and inviting, Carmelita’s tended toward cool and appraising, taking in the world without offering much in return.
Rosie took Chuck by the hand and bunny-hopped alongside him out of the black-lit room behind her sister.
After the museum visit, Chuck, Janelle, and the girls wandered with the crowds along Rim Trail, the strip of pavement that separated the village from the canyon. They escaped the blazing midafternoon sun by ducking into each of the several hotel gift shops that faced the trail and the gaping canyon beyond.
As they strolled from shop to shop, Chuck maintained a discreet distance between himself and Janelle, counting on the passage of time to dissipate any residual heat from her comments in the museum passageway even as the day’s temperature kept climbing. He set himself to finding a gift for her in one of the shops. In the gift shop on the ground floor of Kachina Lodge, and again in the Bright Angel Lodge gift shop, he spotted some earrings he thought Janelle would like—though he wondered if she would see his present as too obvious an act of atonement.
Not daring to risk it, he abandoned the earring display and made his way to the safety of the camping-gear section in the far corner of the store. There, among familiar displays of extended-reach lighters and LED flashlights, one item caught his eye: an old-school hatchet, silver, with a black rubber handle and hard plastic head cover. The hatchet, the last in the store, hung alone between foil packets of dehydrated strawberry ice cream and a row of digital compasses that pointed to true north at the press of a button. He slid the hatchet off its hangar rod; it was coated in a layer of dust. Hatchets were fast becoming relics of a bygone era. Rather than use one to chop kindling, it was far easier these days to start a campfire with a squirt of lighter fluid and the flick of a butane lighter.
He gave the hatchet an experimental swing. It was heavy and solid in his grip. He felt someone’s eyes on him and glanced up in time to catch Carmelita watching him from a T-shirt display on
