Workdays, Angie Juarez left the house before sunrise, long before Rose or Hazel woke. That early, Angie could take her time setting up the shop, drink coffee, read the paper, hum low in the silence. Early mornings had been her papa’s habit, too, and she used to think it was an awful chore to get up before dawn, but now she understood. There was nothing quite like waking with the sun, in her own special quiet place, watching the world yawn and stretch around her.
Half asleep, in the glow cast by the nightlight, Angie pulled on her flannel shirt, jeans, and boots. Rose lay sprawled across the bed, the sheets twisted and tangled like a clump of seaweed. Angie sat on the corner of the bed and patted her bare leg, but her girlfriend didn’t budge. She’d been up late again. She’d been up late a lot, prowling the living room and eating handfuls of dry cereal and watching reruns, which meant something was bugging her. When Angie had asked, “What’s wrong, hon?” Rose teared up and said, “I don’t know.” Angie tried to let her be. Rose would talk when she was good and ready, not a second before. Could be anything: her mother selling her home and moving into the guest house, the two-year anniversary of her father’s death, something to do with the motel and her sister Stevie, more bullshit from her boss at the bank, her upcoming birthday. Angie worried if she pushed too hard, Rose would run. After all, there was a time when Rose had run. Even now, so many years into their life together, those dormant memories erupted: waiting up until the sun seeped through the blinds when Rose didn’t come home, waking up to find her gone. A night, a couple days, sometimes longer, young Hazel oblivious in the crib. The last episode had been four years ago, when Hazel was away for a week at the YMCA camp in Prescott. Three days, no note, and then Rose was home without a word. Then Angie had told her if she did it again, that was it, she was gone, and Rose had fallen to her knees in sobbing apology, begging, promising. That morning, though, as Angie squeezed Rose’s warm foot, recognizing those signs, she wondered if she would ever stop waiting for the moment she’d wake up to find Rose gone. Her throat tightened, a familiar lava heat and fear tinged with anger. She pressed at the hollow of her neck where unspoken words lodged, poised and sharp as a scorpion’s tail.
After Angie let out the dogs, and fed them, the cat, and their new turtle, she stopped in Hazel’s room. She kissed her on the forehead and stroked her smooth brown hair. Hazel was the one good thing to come out of Rose’s disappearing acts, the product of a brief affair with a feckless young man when Rose had moved to Phoenix for a couple years. Hazel, now fifteen, whom Angie had helped raise since she was two—though Hazel called her Ang, not Mom. Hazel, her almost-daughter, whom Angie’s father had missed meeting—he’d died the month before Rose came back to town with Hazel on her hip. Papa and Hazel were bound in her memory by the proximity of his death and her arrival, his terrible absence offset by Hazel’s wondrous presence, by the enormity of both what she’d lost and what she’d found. Hazel half woke and said, “Can we practice driving later?” and Angie said, “Sure thing, hon. Sure thing.” She smoothed her hair harder, tucked her blanket tighter. “Don’t forget to feed the zoo this afternoon.”
As Angie backed the Impala out of the driveway, a lamp in Rose’s mother’s garage apartment clicked on. The rest of the town, though, slumbered as she drove through its streets, the houses and stores dark except for Yum Bakery, where she caught a glimpse through a glowing window of Esther Genoways leaning over her stainless steel prep table. The other place alight was the office at the Woodchute; Angie knew Stevie was inside, brewing coffee and setting out Esther’s bite-size muffins and rugelach for guests. Stevie may have been an odd duck, but no one could argue with how she’d turned the motel around. Listed in the Best-Of tourist guides, booked solid through Christmas with visitors en route to Tuzigoot Monument or Jerome, college parents in for visits, tourists headed to Sedona who couldn’t afford to stay there.
At the shop, Angie set the coffee to brew and flipped through the day’s invoices. Iris Overton’s jeep was up first. Yesterday, Iris’s son Paul had dropped it off. She had told him how sorry she was about his wife. They’d known each other since kindergarten, though they hadn’t been friends in high school. Such youthful divisions faded as time slipped away and nostalgia crept in, as they settled deeper into their adult lives, her growing white-haired and him bald—and now losing his wife to cancer. He was in town with his young son, not sure how long they’d be there. They chatted about the heat, about who from high school was still in town or had come back, a little gossip about who was dating whom. About the jeep she’d said, “It’s on its last legs, but your mom won’t listen.” He’d smiled and said, “Yeah, she’s stubborn.” Angie had laughed and said she’d do what she could. “Take care of yourself,” she told him when he turned down a ride back to the orchard and jogged off down the sidewalk.
The newspaper landed with a fat thump outside the door as the coffee finished brewing, and Angie waved at Beto—Roberto—as he pedaled off on his ten-speed. Roberto now. She smiled. He’d been trying to get that to stick. It was true he looked nothing like the scrawny, shy kid he once was—he was tall and lean now, ruggedly handsome in his low-slung jeans and snap-button cotton shirts—but in her heart he’d always be Beto. He’d be at work here in a couple hours, and then after the shop closed, he’d pick up a shift at the Pickaxe. Angie didn’t know how he did it all. “Keeps me young,” he said, rubbing at his ever-thinning hair, at his broad forehead that seemed to be growing broader, but Angie knew, too, he was helping with his mother’s doctor bills, not to mention hooking up with college students, those clueless, sweet young women who didn’t give him any trouble. Exasperating as it was, part of her couldn’t blame him—envied him, even. Roaming, free of commitment, no worries about being left behind.
Angie slid the rubber band off the paper and smelled the fresh ink. Her fingers would be black by the time she’d finished reading, but then again, they’d be black all day long until she got out the orange pumice, and even then, hints of grease would linger in her cuticles and stain her knuckles. She sat in her father’s old reclining rocker and unfolded the front page.
She blinked and pulled the paper taut. She turned on the desk lamp and put on her reading glasses. The article was brief: Bones found in dry wash by a Sycamore College professor out for a walk. Would be tested by forensics team. Police investigating whether the bones belong to Jess Winters, a seventeen-year-old girl who went missing in December of 1991. Had lived with mother at time of disappearance. Mother, Maud Winters, unreachable for comment. No arrests or charges ever made in connection.
She touched her finger to the page. There it was, the news most everyone in town worried they would see some day, the news they’d been waiting for even when they forgot they were waiting. That girl. Angie rubbed the paper until ink smudged her finger.