Chapter 4: Dress Shoes

At five-fifteen Sawyer was standing beside the Audi in a fresh suit, holding three coffees in a cardboard tray.

The gas station had opened again. The family emergency was apparently over.

"You're wearing a suit," I said. "To a canyon."

"I'm wearing the suit I packed. I packed for a two-hour drive and a stern conversation."

"Those are dress shoes."

"They are excellent dress shoes."

He handed me a coffee. It had cream and two sugars.

"How did you know?"

"You put two sugars in the motel coffee last night and made a face like it betrayed you."

I couldn't help it. I took a picture of him, right there, leaning on his spotless car in the blue dawn with the coffee tray.

He looked pained.

"Is that for the portfolio?"

"That's for me. To remember the day a lawyer wore loafers to Capitol Reef."

Dot came out of her room in her red hat with the Leica around her neck and climbed into the back seat without a word.

"Six-oh-two," she said. "Drive, Counselor."

Her spot was in the old orchards of Fruita, where the Fremont River runs under the red cliffs.

She walked straight to it.

A cottonwood, and a split-rail fence, and the cliff behind them catching fire at the very top.

"I slept right there," she said, pointing at the grass. "Under that tree. I was twenty-three and furious and I had eleven dollars."

"What did you shoot?"

"The fence. I couldn't afford the cliff."

I held up my thumb against the sky and shot it.

Then I walked away from her spot.

Ten feet. Twenty.

Sawyer followed me down the trail in his shoes, very carefully.

"Isn't the fence the picture?"

"The fence is her picture," I said. "Hers is in a museum."

I found it at the river.

A mule deer had come down to drink at the bank.

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