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cabin and the two meadows. (In fact, there were no meadows in The Meadows, Inc.) Cress spent weekend afternoons on the cabin’s shady porch, technically trespassing, but she never ran into any Bauer—or anyone at all. She stretched out on a waney-edged wooden bench to read and daydream and doze until the bugs or the rising cold or the sinking sun sent her home. Such was her teenage wilderness experience: hours alone on a bench.
    Sylvia Hartley’s strategy to keep her girls away from boys, booze, and drugs so easily could have backfired. For all the attention Sylvia and Sam actually paid to their daughters up in the Meadows, Cress and Sharon might have spent their days joyriding on borrowed snowmobiles, smoking pot, losing their virginities on the warm smooth granite slabs by Spearmint Creek. Had there been any Meadows boys, or even naughty girls. But the Meadows never prospered as Reggie Thornton predicted. Rope tow and clubhouse, tennis courts and skating rink never materialized; families never swarmed the mountain, nor did land prices skyrocket. Around the time Cress started college, Reggie Thornton was forced to sell the Meadows Lodge and Land Company. Cress was in grad school when her mother reported that Reggie was in prison for killing a young couple in a head-on collision while driving drunk.
    *   *   *
    Jakey Yates came over on Saturday afternoon and left the A-frame once that night for thirty minutes, when he went to check on the lodge. They ate and drank in bed. He brought steaks and a stack of LPs and sang along with George Jones and Lefty Frizzell, clamping her under his hot arm.
    He rolled his big overheated body right on top of her, and she gasped with laughter, then for breath.
    The next day, she and Jakey hiked to the fire lookout on Camel Crags; he’d packed sandwiches and wine, and he gave the firewatcher twenty bucks to go for a shower and a beer at the lodge while they borrowed his bed, with its three-hundred-degree view. They laughed and grabbed their clothes when they heard hikers clomping up the wooden stairs from below.
    He had been single now for two years, Jakey told her in that tiny glass hut. His wife had waited until the day their youngest graduated from high school to move out. In fact, they were driving between the graduation ceremony in Sparkville and the celebratory dinner at the Sawyer Inn when his wife said that she was filing for divorce, and even as they spoke, a moving company was in their home taking everything she’d tagged. He’d noticed that morning yellow confetti dots on a lamp, the back of the rocking chair, a pillow. Vaguely, he’d blamed the grandkids and in the flurry and excitement of the day forgot about it.
    â€œShe hated it up here,” Jakey told Cress.
    From where they reclined, looking out on ridge after ridge, to the far escarpments and white glaciers of the Sierra Nevada, not one squiggle of smoke drifted upward. Jakey admitted that he had played the field some since his wife left, but he was losing his taste for it. “Enough diversion,” he said, and added, thrillingly, “I’m ready for some real company.”
    *   *   *
    They took long drives in his battered green truck down logging and fire roads deep into backcountry to check for grouse or deer or cougar, whatever was on his mind. (Cougar. Who knew she’d ever track cougar?) They drank hard liquor and talked. They used beds in various cabins whose owners had entrusted their keys to Jakey, and sometimes the cool banks of streams. One night, he took her to a canvas tent alongside Spearmint Creek, just outside the campground limits; the inside was furnished with a small woodstove, Persian carpets (fake, but still charming), and a real bed on a frame, with a tufted chenille spread that left stripe marks on Cress’s backside, as if she’d been tied up or caned.
    Jakey wasn’t keen to have her at his place; although he