"We are indebted to you and will be happy wherever you put us," Betty said with narrowed eyes.
"It's beautiful here." Annie looked out the windows. Across the street was a pink stucco house with an incongruous rich green lawn. Beyond it, the desert, purple in its shadows, reached out to the snow-capped mountains.
In the back of the house, a large patio surrounded two sunken areas, one containing what seemed to be a kind of outdoor kitchen with refrigerator, grill, and bar, the other centered on a fire pit. Beyond that was a pool, a golf course, and then more mountains and the wide Western sky.
"We practically live outside," Rosalyn said proudly, seeing Betty staring out.
"No, but look at that scrawny dog," Betty said. "Just sunning himself on the golf course. It's so sweet."
"Lou!" Rosalyn cried. She began waving her arms. "Shoo! Shoo! Lou! The coyote!"
The animal rose lazily to its dainty feet and loped away across the green, turning its head once or twice to look back at the small, wildly gesticulating woman.
"You did it!" Lou said proudly. "My little frontier woman. You bow to no coyote!"
But within seconds they beheld another reason for the coyote's rapid departure: a golf cart, its fringed canopy bumping jauntily, carrying two girls, rattling across the exact spot where the coyote had lain.
"Oh, look!" Rosalyn said. "It's Crystal and Amber!"
For a moment Annie wondered if Rosalyn had spotted mineral deposits in the rocky mountains above them. Then she realized she was referring to the golf cart girls. They were both in their twenties, tanned and fit and wearing shorts, their identically pretty bellies exposed below tiny stylish polo shirts. They resembled each other so much they had to be sisters, but one, the younger, was dark and bright, her eyes sparkling with certainty, while the older had a fair, indefinite smoothness. Neither was beautiful, but they both conformed to the rules of fashion and gave off a vague sense of beauty anyway, like a fire that burns bright but has no heat.
"Did you see the wolf?" the older one, who was Crystal, said. "Oh my God, I was freaking out."
"It was a coyote," said Amber. "Don't you ever watch Nat Geo?"
"Well, whatever," said Crystal, her face glowing with excitement.
Amber and Crystal were in Palm Springs house-sitting. They did not call themselves house sitters, though. They were "home sitters," they said. Rosalyn had met them on the golf course and they had "adopted" her. Accustomed to standing by as people made a fuss over her husband as he made a fuss over them, Rosalyn had, not surprisingly, grown fond of the two girls. They had arrived now to take her around the golf course and drop in on any neighbors who happened to be sitting out on their patios having cocktails.
"Don't the neighbors mind?" Annie asked. "I mean, if you're not invited?"
The girls looked at her as if she were the middle-aged librarian she was.
"Oh, Annie, don't be such a stick in the mud. You're in Palm Springs now! You're on vacation," Rosalyn said, climbing aboard the golf cart and waving gaily as it trundled off across the bright green turf.
Annie waved back, chastened. She and Miranda proceeded to the guesthouse, a little miniature of the main house. Miranda was almost giddy with pleasure. She spun around the small patio facing the mountains.
"I love it here!" Miranda shouted. "The sky. The mountains. The froufrou minimalism of the houses. The lawns in the desert. The coyotes on the golf course. It's so wild and dowdy at the same time. I just love it!"
She stretched out on a chaise. "Sun!"
"Don't get a burn," Annie said, more because she felt it was somehow expected of her than because she worried about the late-afternoon rays.
But Miranda, eyes closed, just shook her head and smiled.
Annie sat outside that night missing her children. Christmas holidays without them were a sickly, hollow time. She had spoken to them earlier, using the computer and seeing their faces, distorted by the angle of their laptops. Nick had wanted her to send him the shampoo he liked and more contact lenses. Charlie was too old to ask her to do long-distance errands. That was a blessing, but it made her sad, too. Everyone grew up, it seemed. Except perhaps Miranda.