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can't tell him in person, Le."
    "Or to every gossip-hungry reporter who's looking to break the back of yet another politician, and don't call me Le. Only my friends call me that, and as I recall, we are no longer friends."
    He nodded and shrugged. "Sorry you feel like that. But as I recall, Doctor , if anyone has the right to feel pissed about what happened between us, it should be me. You unloaded me, remember? 'Been nice knowing you, Whitehorse , but I have my future to think about and you're not included.' Guess you couldn't handle the heat you would have gotten over showing up at the senior prom with an Indian on your arm. I was good enough to screw in the back of old pickup trucks, but not to be seen with in public."
    Leah jumped up and threw the coffee in his face. He did not blink. She, on the other hand, turned white as the gauze in the waste bin. Her body shook. "You're a bastard, Johnny. A real bastard. No one but a cold-hearted bastard would have so proudly and arrogantly told my father to his face that he had been 'screwing' his daughter for nearly a year right under his own roof. But then, maybe that's why you were crawling into my bed in the first place. It was your way of retaliating against my father. How better than to seduce the boss's daughter. Pay him back for what you believed was shabby treatment of your father."
    Johnny swiped the dripping coffee off his chin with his hand.
    Leah's eyes pooled with tears, and she took a steadying breath. "You were always a hothead, Johnny. So full of anger you couldn't rationalize beyond striking out at anyone you believed wronged you. Fight first, then ask questions. You hated my father for his wealth and power and the fact that your father had to work for a white man in order to survive. Yet look at what you've become. You beat your breast over the stereotyping of Indians. You rant on 20/20 about the mistreatment of Native Americans by the government, and how the whites should strive to better understand the earth's people. Yet, look at how you live, Johnny. Where you live. Not on the reservation. Not among your people—"
    "I didn't come here to exchange insults, Le—excuse me, Doctor. I just wanted to see my goddamn horse."
    "So you've seen it."
    They stood in silence, glaring.
    "Fine," he finally snapped, then turned on his heels and hit the screen door with the palms of both hands. "See ya around, Doc. I'll have Roy pick up the mare and colt at the end of the week. Just send me a bill. I'm good for it."

THREE

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    F rom her bedroom window Leah could lie in bed and watch traffic come and go along Highway 249. There were trucks, mostly, area ranchers traveling to and from the city, some hauling horse or cattle trailers, others hauling flatbed trailers of hay bales stacked as high as a two-story house. Occasionally a tractor lumbered by at a snail's pace, causing impatient drivers to pass on the wrong side of the road into incoming traffic. Just a month before, a teenage boy had driven his car head-on into an oncoming semi, too busy giving the old man on the tractor the finger to notice that he was barreling into death's clutches. Leah had attempted to give the young man CPR while waiting for the paramedics to arrive. But there was too little left of the kid's face and chest for it to do much good. He'd sailed through the windshield of his car and splattered against the truck's grill as if he were a bug.
    Not long after Johnny's visit, Leah's fever spiked at one hundred and three. Shamika put her to bed, proceeded to pump her full of orange juice and aspirin, threatened her with physical harm if she so much as thought of answering the phone again before she had kicked the fever. "You're not going to do anyone any good if you're in the hospital," she declared with that telling tone that warned Leah that her friend's patience was long past its limits.
    Leah rested against propped-up pillows, her gaze locked on the asphalt highway as the television droned in the