Range of Light by Valerie Miner Read Free Book Online

See the people relaxing, you can do it. We unpacked and prepared dinner—a quick pesto fusilli that was slightly too al dente for both of us.
    Then, still caught up in the freeway’s momentum, we drove over to Tuolumne Lodge, where Kath showed me how to sneak into the showers. After washing off the sweat and dust of our long trip, I rang home to say I had arrived safely, to make sure Lou and the boys were well. Lou could have talked on and on, but I kept the call brief. Expensive, I explained. Sipping a glass of cabernet from the lodge, I waited for Kath outside on the warm boulders by Miller Cascade. Brown and green and foamy water coursed downstream over gradually diminishing rocks. If I sat here for a millennium, this handsome stone might turn to sand filtering downstream to the ocean. Perhaps I was being drugged by the high altitude. I wished the name didn’t remind me of a beer commercial.
    The sky edged from coral to pink, but the rocks by Miller Cascade were still warm. It wasn’t cold enough for the heavy green sweater that Lou had bought me on the Isle of Harris the previous year, but I loved its fuzzy security. He was right, why get upset about one indiscretion. It happened in “the best of families.” Everyone had been tempted. I sniffed the deep red wine and listened to water coursing over rocks. I wanted to think it was snowmelt, but this was too late in the season. Rather the stream was the remains of the storm Kath had mentioned. Water rushed through fallen branches, spitting into the warm evening. Lou had noticed that storm front on the Weather Channel. Oh, don’t worry, I said, remembering the apparition of Kath as a nylon gentian years before, I was perfectly capable of wearing a poncho. After all, skin was waterproof. Not chillproof, he parried, tucking the Harris pullover in with the jeans and turtlenecks. Hugging my sweater now, I inhaled the luscious lanolin scent. I hoped my woolly benefactor continued to bleat in a misty pasture with a new coat of her own.
    â€œHey, look,” Kath called. Then a high-pitched squeak next to my knee. I glanced down at the small, striped creature and could hear Lou’s hyper warning, “Watch out for the rodents. Even the cute ones carry rabies.”
    â€œBelding ground squirrel,” said Kath. “He’s a tame little guy.”
    I grinned at Kath’s wet, sleeked back hair, which looked almost brown. Her fresh face shone; she had so few wrinkles it was hard to believe we were the same age.
    â€œBut”—Lou’s scrupulous, engaged voice emerged from my mouth—“why do you call the squirrel ‘he’? Could be female. We always do that to animals.” I paused, musingly, to take the sting from my criticism. “Call them ‘he.’ ”
    Kath pursed her lips. “Except spiders.”
    Sipping the wine, I glanced curiously from the squirrel to Kath and back again.
    â€œHey, look, up there.”
    Peering, I saw nothing.
    â€œMarmot,” whispered Kath. “See, a yellow marmot, that groundhog-looking animal, ducking in and out? See her between the rocks?”
    â€œYes.” I nodded, although I saw nothing. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would open my eyes.

Chapter Five
    Kath
    Monday Evening / Tuolumne Meadows
    SITTING WITH ADELE on the boulders by Miller Cascade, I felt we’d always been friends. So easy now, to talk and laugh together. Still the same people, just scuffed and polished here and there. Adele seemed softer. More assured. I suppose I’d developed something resembling a sense of humor. Really, this was completely natural, like we’d seen each other every week during the last twenty years. Also eerie, like those decades hadn’t happened. Over the next week I’d be asked to explain my life, my failures, my accidental but not yet fatal course.
    â€œHow was the phone call? Are Lou and the boys doing OK?”
    Adele’s face washed with