The Secrets She Keeps Read Online Free PDF Page A

burned into wood, hangs over the door. Next to Avalon is Shangri-La. The windows of that bungalow are open, and Nash can hear the click-tick-tick of Hadley Bernal’s typewriter.

    There are two twin beds with quilt bedspreads, and a wooden nightstand with a reading lamp and an ashtray that someone stole from the Nugget. The mothers with children stay here, and there is a bookshelf with games for them: Easy Money and Raggedy Ann and a Giant Cootie, who doesn’t have many legs left. Gloria put some of her old books in here before she left home— Little Toot on up to The Dana Girls —but Nash would never give away her old books.
    “Nothing fancy,” Jack says.
    “I don’t even like fancy,” Lilly Marcel says.
    Jack tries again. “The main house is much more comfortable.”
    “Summer camp,” Lilly Marcel says.
    “With cocktails,” Jack says, and they both laugh.
    “I’ve never been to summer camp.”
    They leave her there to rest up. Sometimes, when they finally close the door, you can hear them burst into tears. Or else there is just the sigh of bedsprings.
    “There you go,” Jack Waters says to Nash. “You see?”
    She hasn’t even told him how worried she’s been about her mother leaving her in charge, but he knows. Her heart crashes at his knowing. There’s the feeling that they’ve accomplished something together, and this pleases her so much that a warm buzz starts in her chest. After all these years growing up at the ranch, with all the broken hearts and wrongly hopeful ones, she hasn’t learned a damn thing.
    —

    It gets so cold here in the evenings. People from the city don’t know this about the desert. They expect what they see in the movies: heat and dust and cowboys. Some even think they’ll see Indians. Horses! Rifles! Tumbleweeds! It is heat and dust, but not only heat and dust. It is also frigid nights. It is cowboys, yes, but they are the men Nash knows. Danny, who left home when he was fifteen, who rides the fence and can fix a tractor engine just by looking at it. He once screamed when a spider fell in his lap, and they haven’t let him hear the end of it since. There’s Cliff, too, who’s been at the ranch since he was a young man; he delivered both Bluebell and Zorro and buried Little Britches and once drove all the way to San Francisco to pick up a tearful guest too scared to make the trip alone. It is tumbleweeds but also the purple-flowering carpets of verbena, and the scorpion weed, with its horrible smell of body odor and the prickly hair that can cause a rash if you’re not careful to keep your distance. It is horses, yes, but each horse: Maggie, who gets depressed in bad weather, and Zorro, who sees your soul when you look in his eyes, and Bluebell, who is high-strung and prefers Jack. The rifle is a real one, the Savage Model 720, an automatic, which Alice keeps under her bed in case of wolves or coyotes. Before he died, Nash’s father tried to teach her to use it, but her aim was bad. Instead of hitting the target on a nearby tree, she shot out the porch light of Shangri-La. Her father laughed so hard he could barely stand up straight, but he never let her touch that thing again.
    Lilly Marcel might need extra blankets, the way the cold drops down at night, so Nash carries a stack of quilts to her cabin. The evening light is turning pink, and there are these smells: sage, and cooling dry grass, and horse manure, smells Nash loves. Just down the path, though, Nash runs into Lilly as she’s coming out of the bungalow where the toilet is.

    “Well!” Lilly says, as if she’s on the other side of a recent adventure.
    “The main house…” Nash says.
    “I prefer to stay where I am.”
    But this is when Nash begins to worry. Lilly might speak boldly, but except for her large stomach, she is small, and there are dark crescents under her eyes. She shouldn’t be alone in one of the cabins, they shouldn’t let her, Nash’s mother would insist; and it’s possible that