Personal Essay

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With Nick, everyone always wants to know what happened and the truth is, nothing. My story has its themes—money, death, the American West—sex not among them. Unfortunately, by the time I finally got around to writing it, the details, particularly the ones about the West, had gotten hazy. I thought this magazine would be a good fit in part because its readership seemed unlikely to catch a mischaracterization of Wyoming, here or there. The editor certainly hadn’t. The concerns he elaborated on the phone weren’t so much with veracity as its implications. 

“But that’s really what happened,” I said.

“Exactly!” said the editor, “I know that. That’s exactly what I’m saying. What I’m asking. With this piece—” piece, that was the word the editor kept using to describe what I’d written, as if it were part of some larger thing “—what I’m asking is, what’s the point? What’s the point of what happened, I mean, narratively?” 

I said I have a question for you. I said Nate—I’d changed Nick’s name to Nate—had me sign an NDA. The editor asked if I’d retained a copy. I admitted that I had not. I asked, well, what if we ran the piece as fiction—would that still count as disclosure? The editor said he couldn’t be sure.

“I’ll check with legal,” the editor said, chuckling, “just to be safe.” But what was funny about that? “My partner,” he clarified, and for a second I thought he might be gay although of course he wasn’t gay. Partner is one of those words that gay people used to use to mean something specific, a specific type of intimacy, but which means nothing now that everyone uses it. “She’s a lawyer,” the editor said just as my computer put itself to sleep and in the sudden blank of the screen, I saw my face reflected. “I just want to be careful with this piece,” the editor continued, “given what happened.” 

When Nick hired me, I was still living in Laramie. I’d never planned on staying more than a few weeks but there I was almost a year post grad, working retail and sleeping in the home office that had at one time been my childhood bedroom. I claimed to be saving up but never said what for. This was partly an attempt to maintain the air of mystery I thought I’d accumulated during my foray back East—I’d gone to college in Northeast Ohio—and partly because I didn’t have a plan although plan seemed less important to me than purpose, which I also lacked. My parents were unsympathetic. The longer my tenure in their home, the more they lauded my brother’s decision—a decision, that’s what they called it—to stay in-state. In what felt to me like an act of maximum defiance, I tacked my diploma to the corkboard that still hung beside the spackled-over spot where the landline used to be. Over time, the creamy, yellow rectangle became obscured by receipts and takeout menus, my brother’s name and jersey number clipped straight from the sports section of the Boomerang. And it was there, where she knew I’d see it, that my mother pinned the envelope that came for me six months to the day after my graduation—a form letter from a loan servicer with a link to the portal and a randomized password I’d have to change when I logged in to make my first payment.

To my dismay, even once I started trying, I still struggled to land what I thought of as a real job. My problem: I refused to apply to anything with the word associate in the title and from the rest, I was rejected on the grounds of no experience. This conflicted with everything I’d learned at college about the value of lived experience, an epistemological commodity I was assumed to have in quantity because I was gay and from Laramie, a small city notorious in big ones for pretty much one thing. 

The truth is, I wasn’t out in high school and even if I had been, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Being gay was okay provided you were otherwise unremarkable, which I was. In the master bathroom at the rented house where our whole class went to party after prom, I necked with Marley Laliberte—pronounced, of course, La-la-bert-ee—until she pulled back and said, firmly but sweetly, you know, we don’t have to keep going. That we did keep going—hand stuff only—only hardened my sense of myself as an exceptionally versatile person, one possessed of or by an ability to imitate convincingly to the point of actual inclusion. 

I arrived at college with this fiction intact; I think now it’s what allowed me to elevate myself socially during those crucial, early days all freshmen spend lying about their origins. At orientation, I came out in a blithe, careless way, as if I’d done so a million times. Only then did I realize it wasn’t necessary; everyone already knew I was gay because of the way I looked and sounded. But they perked right up when I said Laramie. I was the only one at my whole liberal arts school who’d ever even seen Wyoming except out an airplane window, off a ski lift, or in the background of Brokeback Mountain. 

It’s natural to assume there’s more to a story; I let my peers make assumptions about me and their assumptions made me seem more interesting than I was. Soon, it hardly seemed to matter whether my experience was lived or not, so long as I described it sparingly. Discretion and disclosure, I learned, could be combined to make something better than the truth but not a lie, either. This felt bad only when it implicated my parents, whom I really did love although they were neither ranch magnates nor trailer trash but administrators at a community college where my dad had been—what an honor!—interim dean in 2011. Sometimes, I felt something, guilt perhaps, for encouraging speculation about my hometown, my family. These were real people, after all, real people with real, adult interiorities, private intimacies and tragedies about which I knew almost nothing. But my guilt was soon displaced, as guilt often is, by a more strenuous reprisal of the same logic that prompted it in the first place. It’s my life, I reminded myself, I can say what I want about it. 

In this spirit, I parlayed my early notoriety at college into real popularity that, by the time I graduated cum laude with an unironic triple minor, had blossomed into a genuine belief in my own exceptionalism. I was sure that if I could just get someone to talk to me, I would get hired. The first thing I found to like about Nick: he proved me right. 

My piece begins with several pages of quoted dialogue from our preliminary phone screening. Later, when the editor suggested we cut some of it, I objected. It’s important to me that people know I didn’t get the job from nepotism. Nick said a childhood friend of his had gone to my alma mater but there’s no way we’d met because that was long before my time. Not that long, I said, surely—and then Nick cut me off with a loud, appreciative laugh. 

Even over the phone, his eagerness to be liked, to be involved, was obvious.  Such eagerness, which I would’ve found pathetic, even contemptible, in someone my own age, was reassuring in Nick. Though he was older and evidently richer and indisputably in control, I felt as if I were the one doing him a favor. And it felt good. Less to be liked—although Nick did like me, immediately —than to feel like I was on even ground with someone from whom I needed something, badly. 

On the phone, Nick ended almost every sentence with—You know? And I said I did know although I knew nothing about the job for which I’d applied. The posting was long and vague and although I recognized the words, I didn’t always understand what they meant in context. Obviously, I knew nonprofit, we’d learned about that at college, but rarely sans –industrial complex, so my working knowledge was limited. Importantly, I understood that the job was based in Delaware, which beat Laramie in terms of proximity to New York, which was how I assessed the value of all things because it’s where I’d decided I wanted to live. 

On the phone, Nick said that the entity was only incorporated in Delaware (for tax purposes). The property, he explained, was located just outside Jackson. I tried to hide my disappointment and then my surprise when, after admitting where I was calling from, Nick cried out, A local! Laramie is six hours from Jackson; I’d never even driven through.

We love Wyoming, Nick gushed, Wyoming meaning Jackson, we meaning Nick plus wife Joan. For them, Jackson was more than just the location of their second home (later, I’d learn it was their fourth). It was, Nick said, a second community. And we invest in our communities, Nick said. He said he was looking for a partner to join him in something he called, simply, the work. I said that sounded great. 

We talked for twice the allotted time and no sooner had I hung up than I received an email from Joan to schedule a second interview—which I aced—and a third—that one, too—then a final round, held in person. Joan, who functioned as the foundation’s associate-everything, booked my flight and arranged for a big, black car to pick me up at the Jackson airport.

It was April, so there must have been ice on the creek and a new scrum of yellow growth hovering above the willows. I can imagine myself waking up in a guest bedroom with an unobstructed view of the property panning across itself like a computer screensaver—mountain, river, rolling hill. I must have received a tour of the facilities, a cluster of airish buildings designed to evoke various local environmental and historical influences—an oxbow lake, a covered wagon, a granite peak shot through with dark veins of gneiss. Though I’d come to know them intimately, they were indistinguishable to me then. Every room Nick showed me he called multipurpose but I had a hard time imagining any of them being used for any specific purpose, let alone multiple. The architecture was uniformly prohibitive, too delicate or too dangerous, all walk-in fireplaces and narrow mezzanines and floating stairs with inadequate banisters. 

In my story, I called the foundation Aspen Creek. In real life, Nick eventually settled on the Shoshone name for Aspen Creek, a many-apostrophe’d word he pronounced differently each time he said it. The buildings had names, too—Woodring, Riverbend, Cottonwood—and at some point on the tour, Joan would have materialized to explain their meaning and how to use one in a sentence. They’re like people’s names, she liked to say, for example, I’d never say, I love the Nick! I can imagine her, still glowing from yoga in Cottonwood, standing on tiptoe to kiss Nick on the underside of his chin. 

Following the tour, I was shuttled between meetings with the foundation’s board, Nick’s friends, and with its president, Nick’s mother, who treated me with a malice that implied we’d known each other far longer than we had (Nick said this meant she liked me). Last of all, I met the husband-and-wife team hired to maintain the fields and the livestock, respectively. 

I liked him, the field manager. He was young, or younger than Nick but older than I was, with a punk attitude that seemed to me pleasantly incongruous with his outfit—baggy Wrangler jeans, checked shirt, and a baseball cap with no emblem on it. Or the emblem had faded away. Local boy, eh? The field manager said, affecting an exaggerated country drawl. He was making fun of me, I realized, as he continued to shake my hand, hard. The livestock manager smiled thinly. She was wearing a t-shirt from a place whose name I didn’t recognize, a college or a town, slab serif letters just visible above the bald head of the baby strapped to her chest. Nearby, their oldest, a toddler, was playing roughly with a detached hose nozzle. We were in the greenhouse, which was high tech but devoid of plant life. I kept glancing over my shoulder, half expecting to find Nick’s face pressed against the fogged glass.

All day, I’d been walking around, listening to him talk and agreeing, repeating what he said back to him only more emphatically and in different words. But Nick, in his excitement, was unable to stop himself from speaking over me to agree again and so our conversation, such that it was, had become like a shapeless emanation that receded now as suddenly as weather. 

Level with me, I said, lowering my voice, are these people crazy? The field manager laughed. The livestock manager frowned, first at him and then at me. The family, she said, are good people. You’ve got to admit—and on impulse, I nodded yes —it’s super generous what they’re doing here! She made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the interior of the greenhouse and the world outside. And there was Nick, using his phone to photograph the barn roof outlined against a rash of clouds.

It’s like… said the livestock manager, trailing off as if struggling to find terms I’d understand. You’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada? Self-consciously, I uncrossed my legs and nodded, yes. She looked over first one shoulder then the other and I looked around too, tracing with my eyes the wires that connected the grow lights to the irrigation tape to the control panel by the door. A delicate sprinkler distended itself with a whirr and began to mist a row of empty plastic seed trays. It’s kind of like that, the livestock manager whispered, but honestly, it’s not even that bad. 

Leaning against the back wall, there was something large and sharp, a tractor implement, and I watched out of the corner of my eye as the toddler approached it, slowly.

Big Charlie! barked the livestock manager, Don’t touch that!

Charlie, I’d learn, was always called Big because Nick and Joan had a son named Charlie, too although he was never called little, just Charlie, as if he’d come first, which he hadn’t. Despite being close in age, the boys were at shockingly different developmental stages. Big Charlie—though older, he was, in fact, startlingly small—could ride a bike as well as a horse whereas Charlie was large for his age, uncoordinated, and forbidden even to look at the pool without wearing his water wings, which were tight on his arms and squeaked when he thrashed free, as he always tried to, giggling. 

The doubled name was a coincidence that should’ve meant nothing, like a name repeated in a Russian novel, and yet Nick mentioned it anytime either Charlie was seen, never together, one blundering along beside a nanny, the other sprinting off alone. Then Nick would turn to me and say, you know, Charles is a family name or a common one or something Joan picked out years ago. Initially, I interpreted these explanations as attempts to differentiate his Charlie from theirs, or one family from the other. Later, having witnessed Nick’s anxious, imitative admiration for the people who worked what he called, simply, the land, did I realize—he just didn’t want me to think he’d copied. 

The livestock manager apologized, bouncing the sullen baby on her knee. She was about to say something more when Big Charlie pointed and we all turned at once to see Nick, fingers raised, ready to tap on the glass.

The pool was always the last stop on any tour because it was so beautiful, the way it fit flush with the land and the landscaping, reflecting the mountain just so. For a long time after it got dark, Nick and I stood side-by-side, watching the water’s surface quiver parallel with the courtyard around it. I felt tempted suddenly to test my weight against the deep end, as on thin ice, the irresistible click-click-click of minute cracks starting to form.

Locally quarried, Nick said, noticing my eyes cast down. He scuffed his sneaker against the flagstone. The recessed lights clicked on. Nick continued. I feel very excited, he said, that someone like you would want to join us here. Nick said that when he told people back home—back home meaning Brooklyn, although he’d grown up in Manhattan—that he was starting this thing in Wyoming, they thought he was crazy. I imagined Nick at a dinner party. Nick sucking urbanely on a sustainably-pastured lamb riblet, Nick bragging about me to his friends, the kind of rich, progressive people with whom I’d gone to college, only older, Nick’s age, men with thickening necks and pregnant wives, a gay couple thrown in for good optics. They don’t get it! Nick cried out, stamping so hard I felt the flagstone sink deeper into its bed of packed sand. But you see it, right? He said, hands raised above his head, the potential?

If my lived experience prepared me for one thing, it was this question, for which a simple “I do” would have sufficed. Instead, I cited theory. I said something about socially-engaged architecture, something else about the poetics of space, ethics, Annie Proulx. Speaking eloquently about Matthew Shepard—Matt, I called him—I got that swelling sensation I know from experience means I’m making an impression. And when the big, black car that would take me back to the airport, back to Laramie, rounded the last bend in the driveway, Nick touched my back and called me a visionary. 

I’m not stupid. When I got home, I asked my mom for help and she showed me how to look up an IRS form 990-PF. On page one, beneath the name Aspen Creek, in a little box marked assets, I saw an astonishingly large number. 

It wasn’t the number’s size so much as its right-there-ness that astonished me. I still believed back then that injustice depended upon its own concealment to continue. That was why more education was always good, I thought; once exposed, the bad mechanism would cease to function. I got this idea at college, where I also acquired an class consciousness predicated on moderate contempt for anyone richer than me. That my friends and classmates and my first real boyfriend all fell into this category wasn’t an issue because everything was systemic, anyway. Ergo, my contempt wasn’t personal. Might we all be, to some extent, victims of capitalism? I wondered that and I looked at the number, remembering how the property looked from the road, visible, nay, unmissable, in stripes between the windbreak. 

My phone rang and I answered it. A week later, I was driving West towards Jackson in my dead grandma’s Camry, the books and clothes I’d kept from college bouncing loose in the back seat. 

Several days after our first conversation, the editor called me back. Legal, he said, as if the word itself was a joke between us now, would be joining any minute. The phone clicked. 

“Good to meet you,” I said into the silence that followed.  

“Likewise,” replied the lawyer. “I read your piece–”

“Oh,” I said, “thank you.” 

The lawyer continued brusquely, “the relationship it describes, between yourself and…” I might have thought she was pausing for effect if not for the sound of pages, turning “…Nathan…” again, she paused, and again, the sound of pages turning and then silence, like she’d reached the end. “What’s your level of contact with him now?” 

“We don’t talk,” I said. 

“And with the rest of the family?”

“No.”

“Members of staff?”

“Not recently,” I said. It was the field manager who called to tell me what happened; I started to explain but the lawyer interrupted. 

“And after that,” she said, “you never reached out to Nathan? To his wife? You didn’t send condolences?” She said it like it never occurred to me. “Well, it’s good you didn’t,” she said. “I mean, good for us. Still,” she said, “it’s my recommendation that you change more details.”

“Well,” said the editor, “we can’t just change details.” And after a pause he started to speak again, slowly, as if choosing each word with care. “We can add them,” he said, “we can accentuate some and omit—”

“This is a personal essay” the lawyer cut in, “not the Times. We don’t need to know exactly how the kid died, we don’t need to know who found him or—”

The editor allowed that this was true, over-pronouncing the word creative each time he said creative nonfiction. 

“You just need to make it clear it was an accident,” the lawyer added impatiently.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“No one’s disputing that,” said the editor.

I promised to think about it and then we all hung up, first the editor, then the lawyer, and last of all, me. 

Only once I finished the second draft did I realize how many pages I’d wasted in the first one trying to explain Aspen Creek. These are the necessary facts: no taxes were paid on the property. The facilities, their construction, and maintenance were a write-off. Ditto our salaries and those of the landscapers, the maids, the ranch hands, and the ferrier. Nick had complex intentions for how the facilities might be used but was loath to plan anything until we were, what he called, ready. Aspen Creek needed time to come into itself, he said, it needed time to find its purpose. (On paper, it had one, something Nick called lorem ipsum—community-something, art, the environment, etc.) In the meantime, the family used the facilities like a guest house. Or six or seven guest houses. It was a scam but it wasn’t illegal.

I cut everything else. No more ruminations on landscape. No more lifting Charlie up to pet the thoroughbreds (the editor made me put that back in.) No more details about the weekends when Nick would fly in, private, to do strategic planning, which meant long walk-and-talks in all weather while being avoided by the staff—a word Nick used only when he got too carried away to say folks. These sessions demanded from me a high spirit of convivial adventure, like Calvin and Hobbes, although Nick always led us by the same route around the property. Striding ahead, he seemed so sure of his objectives and of mine by extension that I followed his lead, sometimes following so close we were neck-and-neck, his excitement racing my emulation of it until we were both genuinely exhausted, trudging through hip-deep snow in soaked-through Wranglers to see, yet again, the pool at sunset. Standing beside him at the water’s edge I tried not to think about the failed arctic expeditions I’d read about as a child, gentlemen explorers found dead with heavy packs full of fine cutlery.

Sometimes, Nick and I would go to town to build relationships with local nonprofit leaders. These were middle aged ladies who, depending on what organization they represented, reminded me either of Nick’s mother or of my own. In the clear, bright, year-round sunlight, we’d eat our comped lunches and discuss the potential collaborations between our two organizations. For the Nick’s-mom-types, this meant board meetings, galas, auctions. For the my-mom-types, this meant polite but persistent inquiries as to whether we might consider a grant proposal from a library or a soup kitchen or a summer camp for terminally ill children. 

And afterwards, in the car, Nick would insist I repeat everything he’d said back to him then speculate about how he’d come across. His self-consciousness was so compulsive it was almost endearing; his repetitive need to acknowledge the thing he called his privilege, so much like a child who can’t sleep until the closet door has been opened and closed and opened and closed again. From the start, I knew Nick hired me because of what he called my background; over time, I learned he valued our similarities as much as our differences. I think he liked, though he never would have said so, that I was white and a man. In these categories at least, we were similarly privileged and thus, by Nick’s own anxious calculation, mutually implicated. It sounds paranoid but Nick was paranoid, and actually ashamed, I sometimes thought, always wondering what people could tell about him, about his background, from the way he looked or sounded

Of course, it occurred to me he might be gay. (If he’d been born a decade later, I thought, he’d be queer, at least.) Indeed, the diligence with which Nick avoided the subject of my sexuality was incriminating, especially compared with the assumptions he made so freely about my childhood. It was a familiar dynamic that felt, alone with Nick at Aspen Creek, new again or more extreme. Nick thought I’d made it out; he really believed I was that exceptional. This made me like him which made him like me which made me, in turn, more amenable to his attempts to align with me, with his idea of me, its politics and aesthetics. So whereas Nick spoke often, if nebulously, about money, I learned not to, or to do so only in such a way that positioned him on the side of the light. This could be achieved by comparing Nick favorably to his mother, who, if unkindness really was evidence of her affection, must have loved Nick very much. 

I worked at Aspen Creek for almost two years and the whole time, I told my parents I was running an artist residency. Once, we hosted a month-long retreat designed to stimulate collaboration across disciplines. The residents—a writer, a dancer, a documentary filmmaker—were friends of Nick’s, though this did not exempt them from having to sign NDAs. When I slid the thick packets across the table towards them I was reminded in a flash of my first day and of Nick’s family’s lawyer, a stern man I never saw again although his name occasionally appeared in all-staff emails, emphasizing the importance of something he called discretion.

And initial here, I said. And here.

If it was up to me, Nick added, addressing the artists across the table, you wouldn’t have to sign a thing. And I swear I could feel him beside me, winking at his friends, and I knew it was the beginning of the end. 

The lawyer and the editor were already on the call when I joined, a few seconds late. There must have been a click that meant someone new was on the line, but they didn’t hear it. I listened, failing to make my presence known, while they talked, first about what ingredients were required for which weeknight dinner and then about who would be home that afternoon to greet some third, beloved party—a houseguest? A child? I cleared my throat. 

Both the editor and the lawyer were concerned about my portrayal of Nick, whom they called Nate.

“It carries an implication of fault,” the lawyer explained.

“It wasn’t his fault,” I said.

“Be that as it may. The intimation of parental incompetence–”

“They weren’t incompetent—” 

“Neglect, maybe,” bargained the lawyer. 

“Not neglect,” the editor soothed, “not incompetence, just, well,” he sighed, “it kind of seems like, by the logic of the piece, Nate deserves what happened.” 

“I don’t think that,” I said. 

“Of course you don’t,” said the editor. The lawyer said nothing and I imagined she’d turned her attention to something else, her real job, probably. In the background, I noticed a sharp, efficient clicking noise, like a metronome or a faucet dripping. It’s not enough, the editor said, to simply write down what happened. I imagined a heavy, retractable pen in a fist, a paragraph being deleted, one letter, one keystroke, at a time. While the editor talked about Charlie, the clicking continued, sourcelessly, like a spreading crack.

“I can just take that part out,” I said and to my surprise, I felt tremendous relief. But the editor disagreed. 

“No, no, no,” he assured me. What happened after I left Aspen Creek, he said, was what made my time there worth reading about. “Charlie is the whole point—” he said and I realized then that I must have started saying Charlie’s name out loud because in my piece, I’d changed it to something else, I couldn’t remember what—“without Charlie, it’s just an essay about a bad boss you had once.” 

What images I can recall from Aspen Creek are few but vivid. Little tableaus cast in crisp circles of light, like a huge house explored by candlelight. So much of what I do remember are words and phrases, Nick-isms, his habit of calling Jackson town, and me kid. I remember one afternoon we were driving home from Jackson, from town—and it was spring again, the median green, the windshield clouded with pollen—and Nick lifted his hand off the gear shift and put it—I swear, this is true—right onto my lap. He’d been telling me what a good job I’d been doing, kid, and I looked down and saw that the cloth he kept folded in his pocket, the one he used to clean his glasses, was bunched up and showing through the khaki of his pants. Looking where I was looking, or maybe feeling me, or else sensing me start to shift towards him over the center console, Nick withdrew his hand quickly and made some comment about the landscape flashing past. Wyoming or its potential. Vast, vast, vast. 

Really, it wasn’t that bad. Awkward, at worst. I wasn’t even sure who had rejected whom. What pained me was what followed; a sharp reduction in Nick’s interest in me, the eventual, total loss of our specific intimacy. Over time, he visited the property less frequently, and when he did come, it was always with a gaggle of friends, none of whom seemed to know my name. Soon, Nick was treating me like one of the staff. Unfortunately, the staff were accustomed to giving me the wide berth usually reserved for members of the family.I gave ample notice. I wrote Nick and the board nice emails and everyone but Nick’s mom replied with a short, polite acknowledgement. 

I’d been gone from Aspen Creek for only a few weeks when the field manager called to tell me what had happened. I was living in New York at last, subletting from a college friend with a remote job on an extended road trip out West. I was happy but lonely though I was rarely alone. All modes of contact were available to me now—the intimate commotion of urban life. And yet, I could think about no one but Nick. I was obsessed with the idea that we might run into one another. In the city, I felt as likely to see Nick as anyone else, bums and celebrities, my rich ex-boyfriend. I looked for Nick in hipster bars and on the train. At night, I lay awake, imagining what I’d say to him while the streetlight outside clicked from red to green and back again.

So, when the field manager’s name appeared on my phone, I answered eagerly, in the country drawl that had become our inside joke. But his tone was formal. It was tragic, what had happened, and no less so for being no one’s fault—the field manager made that part very clear. A senseless accident but the family was keeping it quiet. There would be no obituary, he explained, but I thought you’d want to know.

After that, I dreaded an encounter with Nick (the idea of seeing Joan was so awful, it didn’t even occur to me, like seeing a ghost). I had no concept anymore of what I’d say to him; it felt evil almost to pretend he might be thinking about me now. At night I practiced how I’d explain everything to someone else—how I’d ended up at Aspen Creek, what it was like there, why I’d left, and what happened after—so that my life might look easy and straight, like a road in the rearview. Under the circumstances it wouldn’t have been difficult to imagine that Nick and Joan had picked up and moved—to Seattle, where they’d met, or abroad, where they had houses number two and three—but this possibility occurred to me only after I’d fled the city myself, and it provided no solace.

After another round of edits, the editor and the lawyer approved the story, and it was published in the winter issue. A month later, when I received the letter, I fumbled and almost dropped it although I don’t know why it startled me given that, on some level, I’d been expecting it— asking for it, even, or wanting to. The rest was all junk: insubstantial catalogs selling stuff I’d never buy, year-end solicitations from gay-whatever nonprofits to which I’d never donate, the alumni magazine, an engagement announcement from Marley Laliberte. I tore everything except the letter up into neat strips, one of those things I’d grown up watching my father do without stopping to wonder why until it was too late and I was doing it too, like biting my nails. In the kitchen, I looked at the envelope, held it up to the light, then propped it up against a bison-shaped saltshaker whose counterpart had long since been lost or broken. I considered it from a strategic distance. I approached it again, slowly, picked it up, and inspected it from various angles. I ran my finger across the Wildflowers of Wyoming stamp. I looked at the return address. I stared at the word Wyoming. I said it out loud, like an incantation—Wyoming, and then again, louder, Wyoming! And then in a rush I tore open the envelope and the letter inside was a form letter—cease and desist—and it wasn’t from Nick afterall, it was from Nick’s family’s lawyer.