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from Cheyenne that didn’t arrive until 3 a.m. He drove the forty-five miles to the ranch as dawn broke and charged only a standard fare. All the McClouds had a stomach virus that year, buckets at every bedside, some pulled from the horse stalls. Still, Daddy crawled out of his sickbed in his pajamas and slippers to hand Victor a crisp $100 bill as a tip.
    My niece, Maddie, is the artist behind the sign pasted on the back of his cab’s passenger seat. “Best Cabbie on Earth!” it shouts, accompanied by a vibrant drawing of a taxi with a friendly brown man waving behind the steering wheel while driving atop a misshapen green and blue planet.
    I hoped that in some small way Maddie’s art negated some of the prejudice that flowed Victor’s way since 9/11. I hated that he felt the need to paste three American flag stickers inside the cab for added passenger reassurance.
    The phone shrilled two more times before I made a supremeeffort to try to find it, lost somewhere in the puffy clouds of the comforter.
    “Where the hell are you?” Sadie demanded as I pressed it to my ear.
    “What time is it?” I asked groggily.
    “It’s eleven a.m. You’re not at the ranch. I’m standing on the porch, so don’t lie about it. You told me you were spending the night here.” Her tone, accusing, was justified.
    “Oh, Sadie, I’m sorry! I was at the office late …” I wondered whether to tell her first about Wade or the obnoxious reporter or the woman claiming I was not Sadie’s biological sister.
    I chose none of the above.
    “I decided to pull a Daddy and take a room at the Worthington. I thought I’d be up at seven and home before you got there.” Sadie and my niece, Maddie, lived two miles from the ranch in a doublewide trailer they dubbed the Can of Dreams. It overlooked a sweet spot of the property that Sadie hadn’t committed to building on yet.
    “Uh-huh, right. Like you were going to pull yourself off of a million-count feather pillow-top mattress at the crack of dawn. Very optimistic. Well, at least you finally got some sleep.”
    She changed the subject abruptly.
    “Tommie, yesterday afternoon after you left, Mama had a little spell.”
    I sat up, fully awake now, taking in the three tiny empty bottles of vodka on the dresser and the fact that I was completely naked except for a pair of purple striped bikini underwear.
    “Why didn’t you call?”
    “I didn’t want to bother you while you were trying to get a handle on Daddy’s stuff because, Lord, we really need to do that. By the time I got there, she was calm. She said she just had anotherheadache and asked why everybody was all bothered. Meanwhile, an orderly was picking up the lunch dishes she’d tossed across the room. She got a little V for that.”
    V
is for Valium. At some point, I think every single word in the English language will be abbreviated or eliminated if it cannot conform to one to four letters. Sadie, an iPhone addict, is on board with this; me, not so much. A hundred years from now, I believe linguists will study our language and write (brief) papers on how inefficient we were with our brains. Why use a complicated word when a shorter one will do? Why store fifteen words in your head that mean essentially the same thing? The poetry, the nuance, the rhythm will no longer matter.
    “Did she recognize you?” I asked my sister.
    “No. Well, yes, eventually. After we got to Irene’s.” She paused. “We took a little field trip.”
    I slid back down in the bed. No wonder Sadie was so eager to forgive me.
    “And what did Irene have to say?”
    “I can hear your tone, Tommie.”
    There are words for people like my sister.
Kook
was harsh. I preferred
free spirit
. Sadie is both my polar opposite and my favorite person on earth.
    There are words in my head for Irene not nearly as kind.
    “She laid her out on her table. She thinks Mama stores too much energy in her head and that’s causing some of her headaches and memory problems.”