Wesley Rainer

The miscarriage started before dawn. By noon I was alone in the emergency room in Richfield, staring at a television bolted to the wall while nurses walked past with paper cups of ice. Rob had already left Salt Lake on a flight to Denver. Debt, meetings, another collapsing contract. He called once, distracted. That night his plane went down in the mountains east of Grand Junction. The casket at the funeral stayed shut. Closed pine under fluorescent church lights in Torrey. Everybody talked about weather & mercy. Two years later a woman named Elma knocked on my door with a boy asleep against her shoulder. She carried a folder thick with photographs, motel receipts, a birth certificate. Rob holding the child outside a gas station in Moab. Rob laughing beside a red sandstone cliff. She asked for money without asking. I paid. Then I left my life behind. Teasdale looked half abandoned in winter. Wesley lived above the old feed store. He wore the same brown coat every day and asked questions like accusations. “Why now?” “Because I buried an empty box.” He took the job anyway. A year passed. We drove back roads through Wayne County, talked to men who lied too quickly, women who remembered too much. Wesley never flirted. Never softened. When I told him I wanted more, he lit another cigarette. “No,” he said. Months later he waited on my porch while wind pushed dust across the yard. “I’m getting married.” “To who?” “Lisa Harrow.” He looked relieved when I shut the door. The next evening Rob arrived alive, thinner, smelling like diesel & motel soap. He said he missed the flight, saw the news, disappeared before creditors found him. The insurance payout had needed my forged signature. “I was desperate.” Rob said sobbing. Outside, cattle trucks groaned along Highway 24.