Battle Mountain

(George Simhoni - Gallery Stock - )

"Push your button," she said. "Unlock my door."

"I have a great uncle with land in central Washington that's planted in every fruit tree you can name. The climate there's perfect for solar. We'll go all solar."

"I'll roll down my window and climb out," Holly said.

"Sorry, but I control the windows, too. It's an Audi, remember."

She went back to cursing and wailing for a while as I gazed through the windshield down the curving grade that had caused me to set my parking brake so we wouldn't roll into a canyon and tumble end over end among great boulders until our fuel line ruptured and we caught fire. Early on, just weeks out of our marriages, when we were more of a scandal than a couple, such a violent flameout had felt certain and may even have been the dark key to our wild sex life. We were glorious, sinful refugees back then, forced from our homes onto the open road by the massed ill will of a small town whose waitresses no longer refilled our coffee cups and whose handful of mental health professionals weren't taking any new patients. One woman, an Episcopalian priest whose feminist views and notorious marijuana use made us think we'd found a confidante, explained to us that the prominence of our exes meant she might lose her congregation if she accepted us for counseling. Holly, who still believed in shame, apparently, asked the woman, "Is that what Jesus would do?" and stared her down until she gave her answer. It was "No," but spoken without embarrassment, and that was the last time we set foot in a church except when we got robbed in Flagstaff once and had to ask directions to the food bank.

"Let's picture ourselves on a piece of land," I said. "First we buy an antique cider press. We buy it with money saved up from quitting smoking and sell the juice at farmers markets. Your beadwork, too. You need to take that up again."

"Let me go, Chris. Let me go right here."

"All because I took a cash advance and lost it on video poker last night in Reno. On a machine that you told me had a 'vibe.'"

"You shouldn't listen to me. That's the Paxil."

"Which you told the psychic at the street fair you'd quit taking seven weeks ago even though she saw it in your irises."

"That's carny talk."

"Look in the rearview. It's fact," I said.