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pants to show me his jail-issued underwear, stamped with a thick black number across the rear, while I looked out the sunny window and over the rolling fields of golden wheat trying to pretend I didn't know him.
    When he wasn't in trouble, or when his wealthy father wasn't making calls to keep him out of trouble, Tom was bored. Bored, he'd jump on a train. I'd realize I hadn't seen him around for two or three days and then I'd know he'd gone to the rail yard with aluminum-foil-wrapped potatoes in his pocket and a pint of whiskey in his pants. He'd hop a freight car. He knew the regulars, hoboes who emerged from the train smoke as if from a Waylon Jennings ballad, and together they'd ride to Montana or Washington State, sleeping under bridges at night and cooking the potatoes in small fires for dinner. Or so he told me. And maybe later told Amanda and Stephanie. Somehow, anyway, they became aware of the allure of their father's train-jumping past.
    At the end of my senior year I was busy panicking about gradu
ation, about leaving the campus, the town, where I'd had the kind of contained success I could recognize. A safe, predictable success. But then my Romantic poetry teacher handed back a major exam on which I had earned a B-, my lowest grade in the past several years, and that knocked me out of the running for the golden cords worn at graduation by the most accomplished students. I stumbled to my apartment, humiliated by this dash of failure in an academic environment I'd believed would never fail me. I pledged to avoid anything that could make me feel that way again. I talked myself into focusing on our wedding, which was planned for the week after graduation. On the pretty bridesmaids and the abundance of roses and gardenias. I sat in my little apartment with my face resting on the cover of
Riverside Shakespeare
and told myself that marriage was good and right and that I must now enter it.

    Twelve years after that wedding day—a parade of pastel-gowned girls and tuxedoed boys that my mother had executed to perfection, followed by a feast of salmon and champagne I couldn't eat or drink because I was newly pregnant and queasy—I moved my children and myself out of our Tucson house and into an apartment nearby that was mine and not Tom's. In that decade-plus of matrimony, I'd gotten what I'd thought I wanted. Tom had gone to work and soon enough started a business of his own. We took our pink-clad girls to church, where we taught the seventh-grade Sunday school class. We made hordes of young-parent friends and often crammed them into whatever Craftsman house we were fixing up at the time for wine cocktails and baby spinach quiches. Tom still liked to wander down the street to smoke pot at his friend Pete's house rather than help me get the girls bathed and put to bed, but that was no big deal. I fought with him about chores for the sake of fighting, but I secretly wanted to be in charge of the sweeping and cleaning and child-tending, and usually redid any of his domestic efforts anyway. What upset me more were the times I'd come home to find him building a bonfire in our suburban backyard, our hyped-up and ash-covered daughters throwing scrap wood onto the flames. Or hammering another tree house into the big maple,
a structure the electric company later tore down after chewing me out for posing a danger to the neighborhood kids. The wildness that flared in Tom was milder, yes, and not as threatening as it had been in college—I knew for sure that it no longer thrilled me. Now his rebel self, when it emerged, was irritating. I was irritated at him and he at me, and it wasn't long before the girls noticed our divide: a mother who wanted to play it safe, and a father who thrived on danger.
    Before Tom and I got married, we'd borrowed my father's Audi sedan and drove to Arizona so I could meet Tom's family and get the first long gander at the utopian ranch he talked about endlessly. He'd promised me we'd hunt for