The A-frame Rex bought with Dolly sat back against the western slope of the canyon, tucked among boulders and red dirt and silver flashes of sage scrub. Rabbitbrush brimmed along the perimeter of the porch, and beyond, sprigs of hyssop shot up in random bursts, fighting with the Mexican hats. A terraced garden splayed from the side of the house and tumbled downhill toward the highway where the asphalt sucked in sun and spat out heat well past sundown.

Big cats and bears were known to nose among the garden beds and slink between sheets on the laundry line, even ambling onto the porch for crumbs and startling Daisy as she played with her dolls in the shade. Rex kept a shotgun ready to startle the bears and the mountain lions. Even so, he kept a sharp eye on Daisy and Levon when they played in the yard with their buckets and shovels.

For years, he’d had a mind to work the wildlife to his advantage with a dude ranch up-canyon. He pictured a whole western-themed outfit where the sightseers could blow their wads. He got the idea from this honky tonk place down the road that had names for burgers like Billy the Kid or The Outlaw. He figured a working ranch with a petting zoo and pony rides and some basic roping demos could pull an easy buck with the way Colorado was exploding.

All his ranching buddies had died or left town, though, and Dolly had nixed the idea outright on the grounds they had a baby coming and they’d need some goddamn financial stability. She’d shot him a glance when she said it.

That was years ago now, and the baby in question—Daisy—had turned four a month ago. Some mornings, when his head was clear and the darkness inside him was quiet, Rex might sit at the breakfast nook and peer at the tree line cut into the early dawn sky and crunch numbers. There was preschool for Daisy and the babysitting bill for Levon and the money they’d have to shell out to get the attic insulated and rip up the linoleum in the bathrooms.

With Rex home that knocked out the childcare expenses. Plus, it galled him to pay another man to do repairs he could do better himself. The math never worked out in favor of him working, especially not with Dolly managing the summer tourist cabins and doing the books for the river rafting business. That was the explanation he gave when anyone asked what he was up to at least.

********************

Levon was up at five a.m. singing his dada song in his crib and pulling up on the crib bars. Rex cradled his son like a football while he boiled water, then strapped him into the baby carrier facing out from his chest. He stood on the porch to watch morning light tilt through the aspens and splash across the nasturtiums he’d helped Daisy plant. He held his coffee to the side and slurped quickly in case the baby swatted the cup.

His eyes fell on the wood pile that needed chopping. Although he couldn’t imagine the blistering cold of winter in this godforsaken desert heat, he knew summer would fade in mere weeks and he’d be wishing he chopped more firewood to feed the kitchen woodstove.

He switched Levon to his back, hoisting the baby one-armed while fixing the strap at his waist and securing the baby carrier across his chest. He’d taken a baby-wearing class at the Y when Daisy was a newborn. The only man there, he’d easily mastered the front and back carry; had learned to tie a sash, secure the baby’s legs, tie a knot with one hand, then feed the sash through the baby’s kicking legs, secure the toddler, and double carry the kids. Once he mastered that, he could pretty much keep up with chores with his hands free.

He chopped wood, but Levon bucked, so he let him down. The baby scooted on his butt after the small butterflies that dipped and spun over the marigolds. Rex felt uneasy and scanned the ground for signs of danger—fresh bear scat, cat tracks, the muted shush of an irate rattler about to sink its fangs into his baby boy’s juicy thigh. He heard and saw nothing except the distant hiss of air brakes from a semi groaning down the canyon bends and the flash of metal as some vehicle flew by loaded down with fishing gear.

Rex scooped up his son and went into the kitchen to get Dolly’s breakfast going. Each morning, he made her three eggs scrambled with mushrooms and greens and two pieces of his sourdough and ghee. Each day she pushed it aside untouched.

He slid Levon into his highchair and fried him an egg. Daisy padded in with her pj’s twisted backwards and her hair a halo of tangles.

She ran to him and lifted her arms. “Didda, didda, didda. My dada.”

He swung her to his chest and held her like he never meant to let her grow up. He inhaled the baked honey wheat of her scalp. The skin of her hands at the back of his neck was softer than what he dreamed possible.

He set her down and poured her a cup of kefir from the bowl on the counter. He’d gotten the grains from a hippie woman at the co-op who had long braids and was giving him the eye.

“Scrambled or fried, honeypie.”

Daisy gulped her kefir. “Fried,” she said. She had a white mustache.

Rex winked and fried up his girls’ eggs, dropping toast into the skillet at the very end. He had chard from the garden steaming on the stove and a fresh batch of yogurt brewing on the counter under cheesecloth. He might start some sauerkraut later.

Levon burbled his baby talk as Dolly stalked in dressed for work and looking like she had no appetite.

“You need protein,” Rex said.

Dolly shrugged. “Gotta go.” She poured the rest of the coffee into her travel mug.

Rex shucked Daisy under the chin to make up for her mother, slid Dolly’s untouched plate toward him, and ate her breakfast in silence. Then he washed Levon’s face and hands, coaxed Daisy into sitting still for a hair brush, washed the dishes, dumped the coffee grounds into the compost, ran a paper towel over the skillet, and wiped down the counters.

He turned to his children where they played on the living room floor. “Lady and gentleman, you about ready to skedaddle?”

********************

Mondays they went to story time at the library. Desperate for adult conversation to break up the monotony, Rex had started driving the fifteen bumpy miles into town for a librarian to read a kiddie book and blow some bubbles in his face around the time Daisy started crawling. But afterwards, when the toddlers played and shared snacks, he found the other women wanted nothing to do with him. He told himself he was offended on Daisy’s behalf, but Daisy was happy to sit in his lap and swat at bubbles. His loneliness hit him behind the eyes with the strength of a migraine.

“Here, take my number,” he’d told a young blond whose daughter Daisy had taken a liking to. The woman’s face went stiff, and she quickly turned away, refusing his number.

He tried again the next time with a different woman. He thought maybe the other one was too young, too rattled to take him up on a playdate. This time around Daisy had smiled at a little boy whose mother had chapped lips and a wind-burnt face.

“Can we exchange numbers?” Rex asked forlornly. “Could get these two together to play, and lord knows I could use a chat, you know.” It aggrieved him that desperation bled into his voice. The woman took his number but never called. When he saw her at the library after that, she avoided him.

Today he strapped his boy into the carrier and led Daisy by the hand to the story time room. He bounced Levon on his knee for row row row your boat, rocked him to keep him quiet while the librarian read a book about a jackrabbit. Afterwards all the kids raced outside to the playground to eat snacks. Daisy loved the snacks. Rex hated it, thought it ruined her appetite for lunch, but it wasn’t like he could skip it when all the mommies were doing it. He didn’t want them to think he was afraid of the cold shoulder they’d shown him.

“Can I have juice in a pouch?” Daisy pouted, watching a boy suck down juice through a straw.

“No, baby, that’s just sugar and food dye.” He handed her apple slices and cashews. In a steel container with compartments, he had placed red and black currants from the yard, halved cherry tomatoes, baby pickles, and elk jerky.

Daisy eyed the other kids’ snacks. “I want a bar. No fair, I wanna bar that comes out of a wrapper.”

If he talked too loudly about the poison these nothing women fed their offspring, he risked upsetting the mommies who were already upset that a man had dared to invade their female territory. “Honeypie, we’ve been through this,” he said. “We eat real food, and real food does not come from a package.”

“I want juice!” Daisy whined.

Levon stared at his sister. A couple mommies smirked in Rex’s direction. They’d love nothing more than to see him lose his cool over a meltdown.

He raised his voice. “That’s just sugar water dressed up in a plastic box that kids suck on till their teeth splay out and rot. Big Food companies make the boxes pretty so girls like you will want it and beg for it and then parents who don’t know how to set boundaries say yes and then kids want more and more because the food companies make it addictive and parents give up. And that,” he said with a flourish, “is why we have so much of the diabetes in this here country. Eat up your jerky now.”

Daisy picked up the jerky—the very jerky he took from an elk out in Montana on a hunting trip with some buddies—and flung it. It bounced off a toddler’s head and fell into the dirt. Rex calculated the cost of currants and organic elk jerky, counted backwards from ten, took two deep breaths through his nose, and blinked.

Levon began to cry.

“I want a bar!” Daisy roared.

Levon screwed his eyes shut and wailed. Rex peered down the back of his son’s diaper, saw a righteous mess. “Alright, Daisy, let’s go. Brother needs a change.”

“Juice! Bar! Juice! Bar!” Daisy chanted in the family changing room as Rex wiped down his squirming, squalling son. Rex’s head pounded.

“Didda, didda, didda, didda, didda, didda. DIDDAAAAAAA,” Daisy yelled, backing away from the soiled diaper.

Levon quieted down, eyeing his sister’s antics. “Dada,” he imitated.

“Didda,” Daisy said.

“Dadda,” Levon said.

“Didda, didda.”

“Dada, dada.”

They harmonized, co-conspirators now. Dada didda dada didda DADA DIDDA dada dadada dadada diddda dada didda DADA didda dada didda dadaiddadadadidda dadadadadadadadadadadadadada diddddddaadadadadada dadada dada dadaiddadadadidda diddda.

Rex gulped air. Whenever they did this, whatever this was, he pretended he was at a rave, and the bugling of his children was merely the beat of the music. His head was fucked, had been fucked, royally, for years. He was lucky to get a medical discharge and military disability payments, but he’d gladly give all that up to be back to his old self. It was noises—and two people talking at once—that kneecapped him, made the jittery darkness inside him stir. He’d come a long way from the catatonic days when he’d stare out a window before coming to, having lost two, three, four hours. Back then he was a blackout drunk who didn’t drink.

Daisy stumbled backward and knocked against the automatic hand dryer. Rex’s heart bottomed out. The grinding noise chewed through him with the shock of a semi’s horn moments before the truck mowed him down. Even worse, he waited for Daisy’s reaction.

She covered her ears. “Loud!” she screamed. She started crying, still clutching her ears. Levon joined in.

Rex stared at Daisy, then at Levon. The baby was half-naked and smeared in shit. His daughter was in auditory distress. Holding in his own hot salty tears, Rex picked up his son in one arm, scooped his daughter in the other, and loped out of the library with his two crying children kicking their feet.

Back home, he rocked Daisy and hummed in her ear, ran a load of laundry, bathed Levon in the sink, put them both down for a nap, then snuck from their bedroom to lay in a square of sunlight on the kitchen floor and weep the tears he worried might drown him.

********************

By her first birthday, Rex understood his daughter was touched with something. She covered her ears and writhed at the sound of the vacuum. God forbid a motorcycle roared down the highway. She’d rock and shake, and he could do nothing for her except carry her in his arms, walking her back and forth and humming some lullaby until she went limp.

On days he couldn’t calm her, he took her to the river. She’d stared at the penny-colored water as it whispered by or crane her neck to the sky to watch the cottonwood drift. Rex watched his girl watch that cottonwood dander and he knew he’d never stop loving her with a love so consuming that it tipped into fear. Dolly didn’t need him. Even Levon, when he came later, didn’t need Rex the way Daisy did.

On the relentless afternoons when baby Daisy didn’t nap, too distracted by the sunlight creeping under her blinds, too jittered from the sound of the blender he’d turned on without thinking, too angry with a wet diaper that turned her bottom red with welts, he took his baby girl to the river, still cold with snow melt. He dipped her pink feet in the water and held her close to his chest. The pain of raising her was the pain of knowing he couldn’t protect her forever; he locked that thought away in a box in his chest, which made it hard to breathe.

Dolly insisted on singing happy birthday and having a big party to celebrate Daisy turning one.

“She won’t like it,” he said. “It’ll scare her. Her nerves don’t like attention.”

Dolly huffed. “It’s a big deal we made it to a year. Stop being so uptight.”

He caved; didn’t want his wife to think he was a controlling man. But he was the one who stayed home with Daisy, he was the one who rocked her and held her hand through the crib bars, he was the one who translated her cries—the sharp cry that meant I’m scared; the hushed cry that meant I’m hungry; the high-pitched animal sound that meant I miss you. He was the one who ran down the hallway at two a.m. when she fizzed with a nightmare. He was the one, he wanted to say, that dragged a mattress into the nursery to soothe his baby with his hulking presence. Didn’t he know her? Hadn’t he earned the right to know her?

Dolly carried the cake with the one flaming candle as their friends and families sang happy birthday. When Daisy’s face froze, stricken, and then crumpled into miserable tears, her torso tight with the strain, it was Rex who rushed to her and lifted her from her highchair. While everyone ate cake, he walked his daughter down the hillside to the river, dabbling her toes in the water to let her know she was safe.

She nuzzled his neck, hiccupping with tears, and petted his cheek, said, “Didda.”

That was her first word.

********************

Dolly came home late from work. He heard her from the kids’ room where he cradled Levon in his lap. Daisy had tucked herself under his arm. He heard water in the pipes and knew Dolly was in the shower. She sacrificed to provide for her family. He appreciated that. He appreciated that even as he wished she could be home more, that she played with her kids more, that she took an interest in who Daisy was as a person as distinct from Dolly’s idea of what her daughter should be like.

Dolly was coming out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel just as he was coming to bed.

“Hey.” She adjusted her towel. He caught a peek of boob and snatch.

“Hey,” he said, pretending he hadn’t seen what he saw. He brushed past her to take the leak he’d been holding in during the interminable bedtime routine.

She loitered in the doorway and dropped her towel.

He flushed and stooped to pick up the towel. He was always finding wet towels around the house. He couldn’t take another load of laundry.

She dropped to her knees and fumbled with his dick. She worked him half-heartedly for several minutes, but he failed to rise to the occasion. Dolly sighed and sat back on her heels. “What is it?” she asked.

Rex recalled the week before when he sat with Daisy on his lap, coaxing bites of oatmeal into her. She was fussy from a bad night of sleepwalking.

Daisy pushed the spoon away. “I want cinnamon toast. I want donuts.”

He pulled her hair aside and kissed her hot neck. “Okay, okay.” He set her down and rose to make her cinnamon toast.

“You’re not gonna let her boss you around, are you?” Dolly asked. She was hunched over her coffee.

Rex stared at his wife.

Dolly shrugged. “Well, she makes everything about her.”

Rex watched Daisy watch her mother. He saw his baby girl understand the words, saw her draw herself inward, saw her little face register rejection, disappointment, hurt. A splinter of pain lodged in his chest. No matter how much he breathed or how much wood he chopped, that splinter remained.

His bride had been beautiful, but this woman kneeling before him now was ugly.

“What is it?” she asked again.

He shook his head. “Tired. I need to go to bed.”

Dolly followed his heels. “Tired? You’re tired? I’m the one that left the house and worked today. I have needs too, you know.”

He slipped under the covers and kicked the sheets. “I’m not a dildo. And I worked today, too.” He turned onto his side.

Dolly crawled into bed. She turned on her side.

They each lay on their sides, facing the wall for several silent minutes.

“You know,” she said, “if you’re so unhappy here at home, maybe get a fucking job. Remember the insurance job you worked?”

“You know,” he fired back. “If you’re so keen to stay home, maybe learn how to fucking cook and do your own laundry.”

He did remember the insurance job. The overhead lights had ticked like a leaking faucet, triggering his headaches. The small talk with his coworkers made him want to commit violence. He couldn’t breathe inside the office’s shit-brown walls. His spine locked up whenever the phone rang, and it rang all day long. He’d lasted three weeks.

********************

The next morning his head screamed. They didn’t leave the house. Daisy insisted they couldn’t. Rex lay on the living room floor and asked her to play stylist, a game he’d invented for desperate times. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. Daisy ran to get her pink plastic hairbrush. She combed the hair on his head and the hair on his chest. She used a magic marker to draw eyeshadow on his eyelids.

“Pretty didda,” she said. She lifted his arm and gathered his armpit silk and clipped it into a pink barrette. She did the same to his other armpit.

Rex yawned. “Armpit hairdo, just what I needed, doll.” He patted her hand. “How you always know how to fix up your old man?”

She beamed.

There was a tap at the door. Daisy froze in alarm. Rex pulled himself up, groaning with fatigue, peeked through the door curtains. It was the hippie woman with the braids.

He opened the door. “Howdy.”

The woman looked him up and down in appreciation, caught sight of Daisy peeping from behind his back. “My word, don’t you look handsome. Someone’s done your hair.”

Rex nodded and lifted his arms. “That’s right. Even did my armpit hair.”

The woman covered her mouth. “That is something special. Well, I was passing through and I brought you a scoby for kombucha if you’re interested.”

They lived a solid ten minutes outside of cell range. There was no trash pickup. No one was just passing through. Rex took the mason jar from her. It held a fleshy jellyfish disc floating in liquid. He knew this woman’s game, wasn’t interested, but he was bored and he was lonesome and his head was cranking.

“Come on in,” he said, jerking his head toward the kitchen. He poured them some water and let the woman explain to him how to make kombucha. She stopped talking abruptly and looked at his counter; saw the yogurt and kefir. She must have smelled the sauerkraut fermenting in the crock.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ve been letting me yap. You know exactly how to make kombucha.”

He rubbed his chin. “Yup.”

Levon belted out a cry. “Hold on a sec,” Rex said. He came back a minute later with a puffy-eyed Levon. The baby leaned into Rex’s neck and smiled at the woman.

She held out her arms. “Look at you. I could eat you up.” She took the baby and fell into a whispered baby talk. She looked up. “Where’d you learn to cook like this?”

He shrugged. “My mom taught me.”

Daisy hid behind Rex, clutching at his jeans. He knelt and coaxed her into his arms, only then realizing he had no shirt on. Holding Daisy tight to lessen her anguish, he asked the braided hippie to stay for lunch. She accepted.

After he pulled on a shirt and freed his armpit hair, he made them a salad with vegetables from the garden. He rubbed coconut oil onto salmon steaks he had planned to have for supper. He turned to the woman, whose name he now knew was Heidi. “Can you go out into the herb patch, out there by the compost, and get me some dill.”

Heidi went to the porch door and turned, crouched. “Daisy, can you show me? I don’t know if I can find it.”

Rex nudged the girl gently. She started forward, took Heidi’s hand. He heard Heidi talking softly as they trudged out to the garden. “You must have planted all these Mexican hats here? Yes? And what about these? Did you plant these? I bet you’re such a help to your dad.”

Daisy was all shy smiles. They turned the corner of the house, threading through the currant hedges.

As they ate, Daisy lost her iciness and talked over Rex to tell stories of when the bear jumped out of the compost. The time a moose stumbled through as they were hanging towels on the line. Rex had craned his neck, the animal’s glossy head and velvet antlers blacked out against the sunlight.

Daisy sidled up to Heidi. “Let’s go to the river. I want to show you where we swim.”

Heidi hesitated and looked to Rex for a cue. He shrugged and shifted Levon to his other arm. “If you have time. It’s all we have.”

Daisy galloped ahead, now fully thawed and overflowing with words. “This here’s the hyssop, and this here’s snow daisies.” She pointed out the ponderosa whose weeping trunk was half charred from a wildfire. Daisy stopped and put her nose to the bark. “Vanilla,” she said. Heidi leaned into the tree and inhaled.

The river flowed at the edges in a late-season trickle, winding over scabby rocks, and green in spots. Rex scanned the ground for flattened grass and footprints. The moose came down to cool their bellies in the river in the late afternoon. He stripped Levon and set him in a ring of rocks someone had dammed up to make a kiddie pool. Daisy stomped in the shallows and shrieked.

“It wasn’t me,” Rex felt the need to say.

Heidi looked at him blankly.

“The rocks.” He pointed at the kiddie pool. “I’m not some idiot who thinks it’s fun to fuck up the river and cause erosion. Neighborhood kids come here.” He went quiet. “Sorry, I’m not used to talking to adults.”

Heidi grinned. “Figured as much.”

They watched Daisy paddle in a deep spot before climbing onto shore. She was a strong swimmer. Still, he watched her closely. Rex didn’t trust the river’s currents. A wind kicked up, blowing hot air across the water and rippling its surface. Cottonwood dander danced across the sky. Daisy hooted and ran to catch it.

“How long you worked at the co-op?” As he asked, a memory of a memory flitted through his mind. He’d seen Heidi around town. He saw her on a bar stool at the one joint in town, scavenging for bachelors.

“Not long,” she said. She skimmed her hand across the surface of the river, then surprised him by pulling her dress over her head. She scrambled onto a boulder and slipped in.

Rex turned and saw Daisy silhouetted in the distance, gathering clumps of cottonwood in her fists like cotton candy.

Heidi surfaced and swam toward Levon. She picked up pebbles and held them out to him in her palm.

“You make that look easy. That water is all of 45 degrees.”

She smiled and handed Levon another river rock, gently pulled his fist down when he tried to bite it. Then she climbed across the gravelly shore and used her dress to towel off. She slipped the dress back on and angled her legs in the sun.

“You’re good with kids.” He hadn’t intended to say it, didn’t want to draw attention to the thing that was between him and Dolly, the thing the gloating mommies at the library must have sensed. He had no issue soothing a fussy baby or changing a diaper in public, but a woman swimming in her underwear unsettled him.

Heidi watched Daisy throwing cottonwood in the air. “I used to teach kindergarten down at the local school. I’ve seen a handful of girls like her over the years.” She looked at Rex long enough to make him nervous. “She’s just fine the way she is. Your instincts are right.”

It came to him then where he knew her from. He’d seen her at the Fourth of July parade down in town year before last, a little boy in her arms. Was a man with her? He thought so. “But you work at the co-op now?”

She nodded slowly. “Daisy was little when it happened.” Levon cooed as a minnow darted over his leg. “You never heard? Would’ve figured the mountain gossip got to you.” When Rex didn’t say anything, she went on. “My boy got the flu. He went quick. One second he was like that—” She pointed at Levon. “I’m not saying this to scare you.”

Rex didn’t say what he was thinking—that he was scared all the time. Scared of losing one of his kids, scared of not protecting Daisy, of failing her, of not being strong enough for her. He was terrified of letting his guard down, certain that wolves would come and drag his baby girl into the woods. And what would happen to her after he was gone?

“I saw him everywhere, heard him too. Some kid would yell something, and I would think, just for a second, it was him. He’d come back to me.”

Rex saw the woman’s pain and what she was working up to offer. “Oh, honey.” He was up and at her side before he knew what he was doing.

“You must be going mad out here all alone,” she said.

He nodded.

“I wasn’t just passing through. I wanted to check on you. My friend works at the library. She said there’s a handsome stud horse that comes by with two little ones who could use some company.”

Rex leaned forward and tugged Levon back to the shallows. He watched his boy scoot across the sandy river bottom on his butt.

“It’s just babysitting,” Heidi said. “I get to spend time with these sweet babies, and you get a little break to deal with those headaches of yours.”

He glanced at her in surprise.

She leaned back on the bank. “Let me guess? Daisy has trouble sleeping. Vivid dreams. Needs you in her room. Undone by startling noises.” She raised her eyebrows. “And you? You’re worried about her all the time. Even when you sleep, which you don’t do much of. You love her so much it’s making you insane.”

Rex wondered how she could see what so many others couldn’t. He pictured Heidi in the town’s only kindergarten classroom, leading children like Daisy in a song as they sat cross-legged on the carpet. He imagined a future for his daughter, a future he hadn’t dared to think about until then. He swung around, having suddenly registered the quiet. He turned to look behind him. “Can you see her? Where’s Daisy?”

Heidi sat up and squinted.

Rex grabbed Levon and sprinted down the bank, calling her name.

Heidi caught up with him. “She was just here.”

They rounded the bend where the river forked, and he saw her head and shoulders crouched over something on the ground.

“Daisy!” he called.

She started. “It’s a snake!” she called out in excitement. “Come look at this pretty snake.”

Rex’s ears rang so that he couldn’t hear any more of what she said. He saw her mouth moving, saw her lips say the word snake.

“Don’t touch it, baby! Don’t touch that snake.” He scrambled down the embankment toward her. “Shit, fuck, goddamnit.”

Heidi reached for Levon, but Rex held tight to his son. His animal instincts took over. He ran fast and slipped hard, went down on his butt into a patch of prickly pear. If he injured himself, he didn’t feel it. Levon fussed and made to crawl out of his arms. Rex held on tight, only cared about one thing. “Don’t touch that snake!” he hollered from the ground.

He could see Daisy now, the snake too. For one sickening moment he heard the angry sound of a rattler. He rose, feeling blood trickle down his back. His ears still ringing, he ran over loose rock and sharp gravel and dry white earth. He ran like a broken workhouse who’d been put out to pasture, or maybe more like a cowboy, the last cowboy standing, gutshot with fear as he ran towards his little girl, his tangled-hair salvation.

He hoisted her up and away from the danger. His chest heaved. He buried his face in Daisy’s matted hair. “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” he said.

Heidi caught up with them and poked the snake away with a stick. “It’s a regular old snake. It’s okay, Rex. It’s okay.”

“Oh god, oh god, oh god,” he kept repeating, crying into fistfuls of his daughter’s hair.

“Didda,” said Daisy.

“Dada?” Levon said.

“Rex, it’s okay now.”

“Didda.”

“Dada!”

“Didda.”

“DADA.”

“Rex.”

He hugged his son and daughter, his arms full of what he loved most. When Heidi tugged him by the elbow up the hill and into the house, Rex was too shaky to resist. He let her push him down on the sofa and pull Levon out of his locked-up grasp. She checked his back for prickly pear needles. He felt a blanket press against his legs.

He woke as dusk was falling. She had washed the dishes and wiped the counters. The children were in the garden. She was reading to them. Rex staggered to his knees in disbelief.

********************

Tuesday and Friday afternoons the kids went to Heidi’s. Dolly didn’t object to the arrangement, which was answer enough for Rex. He and Heidi had no words for what they were. He was happy for now to enjoy the calm he felt in her presence. On his child-free afternoons, Rex read on the sofa, prepped vegetables, ran to the store, took naps, stood in hot showers, did pushups, ran along the canyon road in the cool shade of the lodgepoles, went to a support group with other twitchy, quiet men. He chopped wood. He shooed the bear from the compost. He ripped the rotten soffits off the house and replaced them with good, strong beams. He replaced all the windows with double-pane glass. He tore up the carpet in the living room and found hardwood underneath. He listened to music. He drank water. He swam in the river. His head was better. Sometimes he stared out the window to daydream about his dude ranch, but mostly he worked with his hands.