Find a little yellow side-street house. Put an older woman in it. Dress her in that tatty favorite robe, pull her slippers up before the sink, have her doing dishes, gazing nowhere — at her own backyard. Gazing everywhere. Something falls outside, loud.

For more than three hours the mountains had loomed ahead yet they did not seem particularly closer to Louise. They grew somewhat larger through the wind shield of her truck as it crested

I wonder what we looked like then, that day we drove over into California. My mother could probably still tell you what we wore.

Pinkie and I had come three days from Montana to camp among the aspen at elevation on Steens Mountains, right near the top of southeastern Oregon, up where we used to live. My sister Grace had lured us along the road with talk of serious family medicine.

Weekends I serve fried chicken to drunks who make jokes about breasts and thighs. The manager comes out about once an hour and tells me to please put my cap back on.

“Goodbye,” and she goes. I stay there, holding the gift I was about to give her. Had told her I was giving her. This after-noon, on the phone. I said “I’d like to come over with something for you.”

This was an average dawn in the early summer of 1948, the year I got to be eighteen. “Eat your fishcake, Dougie,” said Lou. They were barracuda fishcakes. Awful. They tasted like it was the fish’s

When a place is too beautiful, there will be repercussions. Such places attract disruptions, encroachments, noxious pollutants of sound and deed.

These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time.

My father comes into my room. “Look,” he says. He carefully opens his hands: a luminous, gold-colored butterfly sits in the bowl of his palms, like a light he has carried into the dark room.