189 Ten J ILL AND I WERE AT LOOSE ENDS BECAUSE CODY HAD rented a house in the energy boomtown of Gillette, Wyoming —150 miles away. He was putting in long, lucrative hours welding the broken parts of huge earthmoving machines that tore coal, oil, and gas out of the earth. Jilian would join him very soon. The fact that she was being spirited away from us had made me skeptical of the world and of people with the power to do us harm. Before Jilian announced that she was leaving, we had agreed to take on a young French woman as an unpaid intern at Wild Idea. She was the daughter of a Parisian acquaintance and, with Jilian lost to us, Maeve became a sort of surrogate daughter. She was confident and wise beyond her years. Wise enough to know that there was a hole in our hearts and convinced that Cody was just a phase for Jilian. Phase or not, Jill and I knew that Jilian was in dangerous territory. She had backed out of going to college and there was a nauseating tension when we were alone with her. Maeve and Jilian became friends before she moved to Gillette, and Jill and I clung to the dream that Jilian would be inspired by Maeve’s spirit of independent adventure then change her mind about Cody and head for Hawaii. On one of the last weekends that she was home, she and Maeve went to one of the lakes high up in the Black Hills with a group of Jilian’s friends. When they came home they showed us pictures of their outing on Jilian’s cell phone. I watched as pictures of the two happy, carefree young women came up on Jilian’s phone. It was easy to see that Jilian was no longer the chubby, grinning little girl that had awakened 190 P A R T F O U R the parent in me. But even though the two girl’s smiles would have looked identical to most observers, they were not the same for me because I felt I could see their futures. Maeve and Jilian were laughing at their images while I sat on the stool in our kitchen and watched the pictures blink past. Jilian must have detected the melancholy on my face because after she had left for Gillette, I found that she had somehow transferred one of those pictures to the background of my cell phone. Two years later I lost that phone in a buffalo pasture but I can still see that picture. The two young women smiling in midair with arms and legs akimbo. They had evidently jumped from one of the cliffs that overhang the lake. They were falling toward dark water, but you’d never know it by the joy on their faces. Maeve stepped into Jilian’s place as though they were sisters. She attached herself to Jill, to Wild Idea, to the ranch, to the buffalo, and particularly to Hank. By then he was a big, beautiful, mature black-and-white English setter that seemed to know what everyone was saying and thinking. Jilian was sick to leave him. When she left, Hank, too, showed signs of depression. Eventually he glommed onto Maeve and accepted her presence in Jilian’s old bedroom. He had, of course, come from France, and, as though he remembered his early puppyhood, took commands in either language. It was a sad day when Maeve went back to France. She had buffered the pain of our loss of Jilian and the house went suddenly lifeless without her. No more cell phone ringtones during dinner. No more help preparing meals or cleaning up. Hank wandered through the house looking for a lively girl to pet him. The evening laughter was dialed back to nearly nothing, and Jill and I found ourselves gloomy and irritable almost every night. Even Gervase seemed to desert us. The old goat had gone head-overheels for the woman in Hill City. Her house was ninety minutes from the ranch and about half of the route was on a gravel road. Gervase was wearing the tires off his pickup and I marveled at his stamina. He was always an early riser and would often be up doing something [18.189.180.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 05:23 GMT) 191 in the shop by five-thirty in the morning. The difference was that, since he had met...