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the street behind some displaced ranch trucks, their original colors obliterated by layers of frozen mud. Their drivers had left the engines running, wreathing the café in blue-tinged exhaust. Winter-furred cattle dogs rose stiffly from the beds and aimed perfunctory barks her way. Joshua stood outside the café, the smoke from his cigarette adding to the general miasma. Lola yearned toward the warmth of the interior, but paused beside him. “What are you doing at work today?”
    Joshua looked at the cigarette in his bare hand as though he’d never seen one before. “Funerals cost money. I just finished paying off her rehab. She swore she’d pay me back if it took the rest of her life. I never wanted money from her. I just wanted her healthy and safe. Goddammit.”
    “When’s the funeral?”
    He lifted a shoulder, let it fall. “Same as always. Four days after. That’s what our ceremonies require. But we’re worried about the uncles in the patch. They’re trying to arrange for at least three days off. A day to get here, a day for the funeral, and a day to drive back. They might not have time for the vigil, the rosary. People are almost as upset about that as they are about my sister.”
    “Come inside. You’ll freeze to death out here.” Lola put a hand to her mouth, too late to block the words. “I’m sorry. That was awful.”
    He dropped the cigarette into the snow. Its tip flared, then turned black. “Everything’s awful today.” He followed Lola back inside.
    A rotating group of locals usually presided over the café’s large center table throughout most of each day, but on this morning young men in steel-toed boots crowded around it. Ranchers bundled into quilted canvas coveralls perched on the edges of their chairs at side tables, as if waiting to reclaim the natural order of things. Lola went straight to the counter, where Nell studied order slips fanned like poker hands before her. “Coffee and a cinnamon roll to go?” she asked without looking up.
    “Better make it two. Jan’s mad at me again.”
    Nell swept the slips into a stack. “A cinnamon roll should do the trick. What have you done now?”
    “I haven’t done anything. She gets territorial with stories.”
    “Hah. Reminds me of someone else I know. I can’t keep up with you two. One minute you’re best friends, the next you’re each sneaking around, trying to get something over on the other.” She punched a couple of buttons on the cash register. The café had yet to switch to a computer. “I’ll ring you up before I get started on these guys. Otherwise you’ll be here all day.”
    Lola put down a ten. “Keep the change and put it with Joshua’s tips. What’s with the crowd?”
    Nell smoothed her pink nylon skirt over the generous hips she termed the best advertisement for the café’s cooking. “Bunch of roughnecks on their way back to the patch from Idaho. I guess they usually drive straight through, but they ran into that storm and got held up overnight. Those boys got more money than God. Every last one of them ordered steak and eggs. Good thing you don’t want steak. We’re out.” She rang up Lola’s order and slipped the change into her apron pocket. “I’ll see that Joshua gets this. You’re not the only one today.”
    “All the way from Idaho?” Lola whistled. “That’s a long way to go for work.”
    Nell slid a to-go cup across the counter. “I thought you were supposed to be some sort of trained observer. We get guys from Seattle stopping here on their way to jobs in Dakota. They say they make almost as much on the rigs as they did in those tech companies that went bust.”
    Lola nodded toward the bunch at the center table. To a man they looked hard and capable and—given the volume and animation of their conversation—well versed in the proper calibration of amphetamines to mileage. “Don’t tell me a single one of those guys ever held a desk job.”
    “You’d win that bet,” Nell