The chief ranger was talking, Bernard Davies. Anna knew him vaguely from a forty-hour refresher they’d attended in Apostle Islands some years before. He’d been a district ranger at Great Sand Dunes, if she remembered correctly. She tried to concentrate on what he was saying but she found herself watching the door through which Lisa had gone with Helena. Anna had been dead wrong about Freddy Martinez’s wife. She wasn’t number two or three; she was his first love and mother of two children, a nineteen-year-old son and Edgar. Edgar had been, as Martinez had put it on the ride out from the canyon, “a pleasant surprise.” Lisa had volunteered to serve as temporary wet nurse for Helena. For this Anna loved her, but she suspected she would have liked her even if she hadn’t proved useful. The baby was a curious thing, Anna thought. She left an empty place in Anna’s lap when she was taken to dinner with the generous Lisa Martinez, rather like when a cat jumped off her lap. The fleeting moment of acceptance and comfort was gone, replaced by a sense of freedom to move.
