![]() Catching the light of a lamp, the water looked the color of olive oil. Yessenia rubbed her ear and stared into her water glass. Maybe it was Wren’s mountain line producing so much interference. “That does sound nice,” Yessenia was finally able to say, the fuzzy hum of the apartment’s lousy phoneline tickling her inner ear in the little silence that followed. Yessenia and Junip could come stay with them during the summers, hike and kayak through the Grand Teton National Park, attend intertribal powwows, if they wanted. He’d already hired a contractor to convert the property’s thousand-square-foot barn into a ceramics studio for her and was looking into buying a storefront in Jackson where she could sell her wares to tourists and collectors, just like in New York. He’d fly them over Idaho to his beach house on the Oregon coast, where they’d take after the little oystercatchers dotting the shoreline and spit any pearls they found right back into the sea-they didn’t need them, that’s how rich they were, rich as birds. She said that Riley had his pilot’s license, too. As much as Wren looked forward to watching her stoic millionaire mountain man freeze his ass off, she admitted the idea of Riley’s naked body slipping under the frigid glass of the waters, parting the steady reflection of those broken mountain peaks, turned her on. Black-footed trumpeter swans roosted in trees draped over a nearby lake Riley promised to dive into buck naked the first day of spring. The silver noise of bull elk, bugling for love, kept Wren up most of the night. She and Riley had begun living together in a bowl surrounded by some of the youngest mountains in the world. Three stages of the last ice age visible from the front porch, a little bit of the epoch before that one. She called Yessenia a month later to say Riley hadn’t been lying. ![]() ![]() “It’s where Riley keeps his fortune,” Wren said, and left. They did care that Riley was white but neither was quite willing to admit that to Wren. They grew up outside Tuba City, Arizona-second-generation Nahua transplants and non-tribal citizens-but four years in the city had turned them into New Yorkers, as Yessenia and Junip explained it. “Why- yo-ming?” Junip stretched out into something resembling a caterwaul. “I mean, why Wyoming?” Yessenia asked in short. Not because Riley was white but because it was Wyoming. Yessenia and Junip, her friends and business partners, told her not to go. Wren was leaving New York to live in Wyoming with a white man named Riley.
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