Trail Head

Theresa Gonzales pulled into the campground lot at four in the afternoon, fifty-two years old and single for the first time since she was twenty-six, and immediately got her boot stuck in soft sand. She yanked it free and told herself this was going to be a good weekend.

"You made it!" Alexander Conway waved from between two junipers. He was forty-five and had the nerve to look exactly the same as he had at her gallery opening two months ago. "Shoshana's already got the tent up. I just supervised."

"Of course you did," Theresa said. She grabbed her bag out of the hatchback of her eight-year-old Subaru and slung it over her shoulder. "Where is she?"

"By the fire ring. Fair warning, she's been talking trash about your hiking boots since you RSVP'd."

"She has, has she?" Theresa grinned. Good. She liked a challenge. Two months ago Alexander had introduced them at her gallery opening, mostly as a joke, and Theresa had thought about the park ranger with the sharp grin maybe every day since. Which was ridiculous. She was two years divorced. She was allowed one ridiculous thing.

Shoshana Scalia was crouched by the unlit fire ring, arranging kindling like it was a competitive sport. She was twenty-nine, tall, sandy-haired, with forearms that suggested she did actual work for a living. She looked up and smiled.

"There she is! Gallery Queen of the Desert."

"Ranger of the Rocks," Theresa shot back, dropping her bag with a thump. "I hear you've been talking trash."

"I have," Shoshana said cheerfully, standing. "I said your boots look like you bought them for this trip. Did you?"

"...They're broken in enough."

"So no!"

"I hiked in them twice around my neighborhood."

Shoshana laughed, and it was a good laugh, loud and unguarded, and Theresa felt something in her chest do a thing she did not authorize. "Okay. They'll survive. You want to earn your beer tonight or just drink it?"

"Earn it. Obviously."

"Trail's right there." Shoshana pointed at the backcountry trailhead, a brown sign half eaten by the light. "Out to the ridge and back is about four miles. We got maybe two hours of light. Think you can keep up, gallery queen?"

"Think you can keep up with a woman who does spin class four days a week?"

"Oh my god, spin class," Shoshana said to Alexander, delighted. "She brought spin class to a fight with a mountain."

"Take it up with the mountain, then," Theresa said, and marched off toward the trailhead before anyone could see her face. She heard Shoshana jog to catch up, which was a small victory she decided to count.

The first mile was all loose rock and scrubby junipers and dry warm air that smelled like dust and creosote. Shoshana talked the whole way, pointing out a chuckwalla sunning itself flat as a rug, naming plants Theresa would never remember, and generally showing off, which Theresa recognized because it was exactly what she was doing.

"So how long have you worked here?" Theresa asked, stepping over a tumble of rocks.

"Three years. Transferred from a park up north. Before that I did five years in another one, so I've basically spent my whole adult life telling tourists not to lick the cacti."

"Do people lick the cacti?"

"You'd be amazed what people do in national parks, Theresa."

"Theresa," she repeated, tasting it. "First name basis already?"

"You're camping with me for three nights. We're gonna get real familiar by Sunday."

Theresa nearly tripped on a rock and blamed the rock. They crested the ridge as the light went long and orange, the whole valley below them glowing like something you'd hang in a gallery and charge four thousand dollars for. Shoshana stood with her hands on her hips and looked out at it like she'd seen it a thousand times and it still worked on her.

"Okay," Theresa admitted. "That's worth the spin class."

"See? The mountain wins. It always wins." Shoshana turned and looked at her, and for a second the teasing dropped off her face and something more assessing was there. "You're not what Alexander described, by the way."

"What did he describe?"

"You'll find out." And she turned and started back down the trail, whistling.

Theresa stood there for a second, deeply suspicious, then followed.

* * *

That night they sat around the fire with beers from the cooler and the sky doing that desert thing where it filled up with more stars than seemed legal. Alexander held court about a lost hiker he'd had to talk down a cliff last month, and Theresa worked on her third beer and her second look at Shoshana's profile in the firelight.

"So," Alexander said, in the tone of a man about to say something he shouldn't. "Shoshana, you tell her yet?"

"Tell me what?" Theresa asked.

"Alex," Shoshana said, warning in it.

"What? It's relevant information for the weekend."

"Tell me what?" Theresa asked again, and heard her own voice go a little careful.

Alexander took a swig of beer. "Shoshana's trans. She transitioned like six years ago, before I knew her, and if you make it weird she will bury you in the desert and I will help."

"Alexander," Shoshana said, and this time it was not a joke. "I was going to tell her myself, tomorrow, on my own schedule. That was mine to say."

"Sorry," Alexander said, and he looked like he meant it. "I got excited. You're right."

The silence lasted about two seconds. Theresa's brain did a fast, embarrassed scramble, because honestly, no, she had not known, she had assumed, she had been flirting with a gorgeous woman for two months under the assumption that gorgeous women came in only the flavors she'd catalogued by age fifty-two, and every single one of those assumptions was currently catching fire in the pit behind her ribs.

"Obviously," Theresa said.

Shoshana raised an eyebrow. "Obviously?"

"I mean. Sure. I figured." She took a drink to buy a second. The beer did not help. "You're, what, six years out? Good for you."

"Wow," Shoshana said flatly. "You figured. Amazing. Alexander, she figured."

"She's a sharp one," Alexander said, grinning into his beer like the menace he was.

Theresa wanted to sink through the sand into the water table. But she was competitive, not a coward, so she lifted her chin. "Fine. I didn't know. I assumed a bunch of things and they were wrong and I'm adjusting in real time. Can we move on?"

"See, that I respect," Shoshana said, and something in her shoulders came down half an inch. "The bluff was bad, though. Really bad. You did this whole thing with your jaw."

"I did not do a thing with my jaw."

"You absolutely did. It's doing it right now."

Alexander cackled and threw a stick at the fire. Theresa sat there, outplayed on every front, and told herself the warmth in her face was just the flames.

* * *

The second beer went down slower. Shoshana told a story about a tourist who'd tried to pay her twenty dollars to carry his grandmother up a trail, and Theresa told one about a collector who'd tried to pay her in exposure, and they were laughing, actually laughing, and Theresa thought, okay, recovering, this is recoverable.

So she leaned in and deployed the charm. Complimented Shoshana's arms, earned by real work, which was a compliment Theresa meant from the bottom of her recently divorced heart. Asked about her tattoos. Offered to show her the gallery sometime, private tour, after hours. Touched her own hair. Laughed at the right intervals. She had not done this in decades and it showed, like a dance she'd learned at twenty-five and was now performing from a Youtube video she'd watched that morning.

Shoshana let her get all the way through it. Then she looked at her over the top of her beer and said, very calmly, "You're trying too hard."

Theresa blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You're trying too hard. You've been performing since you got out of your car. The hike challenge, the spin class thing, the private gallery tour. I'm not a client, Theresa. You don't have to close me."

"I was not performing."

"You complimented my forearms. In one story. About a lost hiker."

Alexander stood up, extremely pleased with himself, and announced he was going to go check on something in his tent that was definitely not hiding. Theresa watched him go and then turned back to the fire, where Shoshana was watching her with those patient, knowing eyes, and Theresa felt it land, the full weight of being read like a map by someone who'd surveyed this exact terrain a hundred times.

"Okay," Theresa said slowly. "Fine. Maybe I'm rusty."

"You're very rusty."

"It's been two years since anyone new looked at me on purpose. Cut me some slack."

Something shifted in Shoshana's face at that, a softening, the first one all day. She scooted her camp chair a few inches closer to the fire, which happened to be a few inches closer to Theresa.

"Tomorrow," Shoshana said, "no performance. Just hike with me and be a person. That's all I want."

"That's all?"

"For now." She smiled, and it was the first smile of the weekend that didn't have a scoreboard in it. "Get some sleep, gallery queen. Big day."

Theresa lay in her tent that night staring at the nylon ceiling, listening to the wind in the junipers, and thought: she's got you figured out already, and the terrifying part was how much she liked it.

Morning came with a ranger knocking on nylon.

"Up and at 'em, Gonzales." Shoshana's voice called through the tent wall. "Coffee in ten, trail at three, and you're going to want both. Water, sunscreen, shoes with actual tread. I saw your sneakers by the fire pit and I have concerns."

Theresa crawled out of the tent with her hair doing something criminal. "These are trail-adjacent shoes."

"They're white. Nothing in the desert is white after ten minutes. You'll look like a lost tourist."

"Maybe I am a lost tourist."

"Not yet." Shoshana handed her a water bottle like she was dealing cards. "But the day's young."

Alexander emerged from his tent looking smug and unwashed. "You two have fun," he said. "I'm doing the nature walk over by the visitor center. There's a presentation about lizards at eleven."

"You drove three hours to attend a lizard presentation?" Theresa asked.

"I have interests, Theresa."

They left camp at three, the air still warm and dry, the light coming off the rocks like something you could lean against. Shoshana set a pace that was easy at first, conversational, her boots finding the trail like she'd worn a path with her own feet, which, Theresa supposed, she probably had. Three years up here. Five more at the park up north before that. The woman knew stone.

"So how'd you end up a ranger?" Theresa asked. "That's not a childhood dream, is it? Little Shoshana in a Smokey hat?"

"Little Shoshana wanted to be a marine biologist. Then she found out she gets seasick in swimming pools." Shoshana stepped over a rock without looking at it. "You?"

"Gallery. My ex-husband handled the books. I handled everything visible."

"And now you handle it alone."

"Since two years ago. First time I've been single since I was twenty-six." Theresa said it and was surprised how flat it came out, no wound in it, just a fact. "Twenty-four years, one man, then a lawyer named Deb who charged me four hundred dollars to watch me sign things."

"Deb sounds worth it."

"Deb was worth every penny."

The trail climbed. Around mile two it stopped being conversational. Theresa's spin class had lied to her about what she was made of, because spin class was a room with air conditioning and a man named Todd yelling encouragement, and this was a real hill under a real sun. By mile two and a half she was breathing through her mouth. By three she stopped pretending she wasn't stopping.

Shoshana waited up the trail, leaning against a juniper, not even sweating. "Need a minute?"

"I need several minutes. Maybe a stretcher."

"That's not a stretcher. That's a yucca."

"It's all the same from down here." Theresa put her hands on her knees and breathed like an old radiator. God, she was fifty-two. She'd known that numerically but her body had just now filed the paperwork. "Go on ahead, I'll catch up."

"I'm not going ahead. It's my trail and your funeral either way." Shoshana came back down and sat on a flat rock in the shade, patting the space beside her. "Sit. We're not racing anything. The sunset doesn't start without us."

Theresa sat. The rock was warm. The air smelled like dust and juniper and something sharp she couldn't name. Above them the ridge went gold at the edges.

"How far to the top?"

"Half a mile. And you're not making it before sundown on those legs, so we're doing the smart thing. This is the smart thing." Shoshana pulled her hat off and fanned herself with it. "This rock is where I eat lunch about four days a week. You're sitting on my office."

"It's a better office than mine."

"Better view, worse clients. Mostly lizards." Shoshana looked out at the valley, then sideways at Theresa, and her voice changed. Not sharp, exactly. Just