Excerpt from The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge

from "Be Careful What You Want"

Pinkie and me came from Montana to the highlands on Steens Mountain, nearby to where we used to live, to the old sheepherder’s camping ground in the aspen grove at Whorehouse Meadows. Grace, my sister, traveling with a new boyfriend, was there ahead of us.

Eighty miles to the west, across the cold desert and into northern California, I could see the shadow of Bidwell Mountain. We ran close to 7,500 mother cows between here and there. Three generations of our people lived in that country where nothing flows to the sea and people take care of their own individual selves. Which is the way we lived until Pinkie and I decided to sell the ranch and take the money. We turned that country life into all the first-class airplane tickets you’d ever want.

Grace relocated in Santa Fe.

Travels like a racehorse was what they used to say about Grace, when she was running her roads. Lean and sun-dark herself, Grace was wearing a pair of wide-hipped white shorts, clean and ironed, but very short. There they were, chorus-girl legs on a woman turning forty-three, purple flecks from broken veins hardly noticeable. She had mud on her bare feet and was touching her tongue to her teeth.

“This one is Vito,” Grace said, and I figured, Yeah, that one is Vito. He was leaning against a buff-colored two-seater Mercedes—Grace always traveled in style.

Just one sober Sunday morning telephone call, and Grace had lured Pinkie and me into serious family medicine. Grace was in love again, and out of money.

So this lad with the rings on his fingers, and no shirt in sight, this was Vito. Maybe twenty-six, twenty-eight, too many rings, grinning and shy as a new dog while Grace did the talking, one of those suntanned boys who finds you when you got some dollars in your pocket.

Vito was half-owner of an adobe motel on the outskirts of Taos, called The Submarine, and Grace had moved her Indian art gallery into his building. As Pinkie said, that mean little streak she can show, “Paying to hook up her business.”

“Vito, you come over here,” Grace said. “These are your new relatives.”

Our Woman, as my father like to call my mother, named Grace out of hope. “So maybe she’d be different than your father and me,” my mother would say, grinning.

My mother was one of those ranch women who go horseback after cattle while some hired lady keeps the house. Nowadays she lives on a mountain north of Santa Barbara, looking over the Pacific, she’s big in the Nature Conservancy, and she blesses me for selling the ranch. “Otherwise, after your father died,” she says, fixing me with those blue British eyes, “I’d of never left that son-of-a-bitching desert.”

Copyright © 2003 by William Kittredge. All rights reserved.