She takes out her phone, and, even as she does so, it breaks some kind of illusion. This is no longer the Wild West, some open and blank space on the map where buffalo roam. This is a commuter town for Edwards Air Force Base. Her husband Bill works there as a propulsion engineer for a Silicon-Valley-funded space company. It is a half-hour drive out west to Bakersfield, an hour from the edge of Los Angeles, but the people who live here would like to think that they've found themselves some bastion of an American West mostly forgotten.

She scrolls through her messages. Her daughter Sarah just now sent her an image, a fan-shaped black-and-white picture of some amorphous mass, the ripples representing folds and curls of human tissue that hold in them the beginnings of a life, though it takes certain eyes to see now.

Bill doesn't know that they still message each other. Of course he would never tell Lisa to stop, at least not with the kind of authoritative, paternal voice he might have used on Sarah. He would frame it, instead, as a question of sound parenting. Sarah is a prodigal child, and you have to draw a line—you can't reinforce this kind of behavior. He expects that, at some point, she'll come to her senses about what she's done and that she'll apologize. In that moment, they can bring her back into the fold.

It's been a year now since their daughter ran off and married her high school boyfriend, an artist-type who already got her pregnant once before, though they didn't keep it. They're fresh out of high school. She's skipping college, which Bill and Lisa would've paid for, to live with this guy who works a couple of dead-end restaurant jobs and has little prospect for his future. Bill doesn't even want them to get divorced—it's too late for that. He just wants some acknowledgement.

It's early, and the sun is only now beginning to break over the southern mountains. It is spring and only faint patches of snow remain up high. Here, down below, green blooms in patches on the grass, and the sidelong sunshine gleams off of the dew. Lisa wonders at her horse, Lorna, who, in this field of fresh, moisture-softened grass, does not stop to browse. It must be a certain kind of loyalty or kindness that keeps this animal from stopping in this vast salad bowl to eat. The horse holds Lisa's intentions above her own, intentions which must be opaque to this speechless animal. They move forward through the field, though Lorna is getting slower and slower, and Lisa knows that she cannot take her out much farther. This creature would strand herself. She would trot out too far, not understanding that she does not have the strength left to make the return trip.

As they move forward through the field, as the tall grass brushes against her waist, as the sun begins to warm her body blanketed in so many jackets, she considers what she should say in return to her daughter's pictures. Sarah is still only nineteen. She married her husband in a field not far from here, one that looks nearly the same—the same mountains as a backdrop, the same summer warmth filling the canopied dance floor. But, while all that was happening, Lisa and Bill ate their dinner on the couch at home, the room quieter than ever despite the tinny murmur of the television.

Lisa can feel the horse's breathing growing deeper, more labored as its sides billow out and cave back in. She is pushing this horse farther than it really should go. They used to ride together all the way out to the end of the field, past the point where the ground begins to swell and to rise into the mountains. They used to ride partway up the hill and turn back to look down onto the town and the valley, to look across the fields and vineyards and housing developments that stretch to the hills far out north. Those hills, steeper and sharper than these, stretch northward the length of the state, through Oregon and Washington and out into Canada.

She stops to give Lorna a rest. She pats Lorna's neck, brushes it. She brings her mouth close to Lorna's ear.

"You're doing good, old girl," she says. "We'll stop here for a second so you can catch your breath. Then we'll take you back home."

Later on, back in the house, Lisa hears the sound of the garage door, a hum softened by interstitial walls. A few moments later, Bill walks through the door into the kitchen. He lays his briefcase down on the ground and kisses Lisa on the forehead.

"Lorna isn't doing very well," Lisa says. "I took her out today, but she didn't get very far."

"The gal is getting old," Bill says. "It'd be nice if we could see her through one more summer, poor girl. Things are finally turning green."

"I know you think that," she says. "But it's not going to be a pretty picture."

"I know," he says. "I know that."

She wonders how much longer the snow in the high passes will linger. It should only be a few more weeks before the grass turns fully green on the hillsides and the mornings are no longer so crisp. If warmer weather could just hurry on up, this valley will roll into summer, and Lorna can have one last view of those hills in bloom.

Lisa grew up on a ranch. She boards animals for a living. She knows what it's like to watch the cycle of life unfold before you. It's different, though, with this horse on which her daughter rode as a child, with this horse to whom Bill is so quietly attached.

"I can call the vet," she says. "Have him here over the weekend. It's the best thing for her."

"I don't know," he says.

An odd fellowship has grown over the years between this man and their horse. Bill, so calm, so reasonable, so governed by logic—he is, after all, a rocket scientist—has found a deep connection to this wordless creature. Summers when Sarah was little, he would get home early from work every day and take her out riding, nearly always getting back long after dinner was on the table. Even after Sarah grew too big for them to ride double, Lisa would find him at odd moments in the stable, leaning up against her gate, talking to her and brushing her mane. She never asked him what he said to Lorna, but she can't imagine it was physics equations and engineering problems.

"We're going to have to do this at some point soon, Bill," Lisa says. "You know that."

"I just want to eat dinner right now," he says. "We can talk about this later."

"I understand that it's unpleasant, Bill," she says. "But you're always saying we need to think logically about these things."

"We will," he says. "Just—I'd like to eat dinner first."

She knows she should feel sorry for him. She should allow him some compassion as he reckons with this loss. But she can't help but be upset. She wanted to go to Sarah's wedding. It didn't matter that she didn't think Sarah was ready and that she didn't like the groom. She wanted to see her daughter in her wedding dress. But, as Bill said, they had to draw lines.

Lisa gets up from her seat at the kitchen table and walks toward the refrigerator. She pulls out a salad she had chopped up earlier and a bottle of ranch dressing. She'll let it all warm up so that it doesn't hurt Bill's teeth. She then pulls out a bowl of chili, pops off the lid, replaces it unsealed on top of the container, then puts it into the microwave.

They eat dinner at the table. The late April light is long, but it lingers farther into the evening. Every year during this time Lisa finds herself surprised anew at the day stretching through their dinner time and into the night. It helps that the food they eat is the food that they've always eaten, that everything about this moment is the same except that Bill's face has slowly filled out over the years and his hair has grown patches of gray.

She wonders if he has heard anything about their daughter, if word has gone through the town grapevine. Surely he knows people who know their son-in-law's family. It wouldn't be difficult. But then, if he did know, and if he just isn't telling her, it would be much worse. It would mean that he's withheld information, that he's kept from his own wife that they will be grandparents. But who is she to judge? She too is withholding this same information from him.

"It's coming up on a year now," she says as she stabs her fork into a piece of lettuce. "Two days from now, actually."

"I know," he says.

"It's just that, with the way that Lorna is, maybe we should try to talk to Sarah," she says.

"She'll come around," he says. "She's our daughter. We raised her. We saved money for her education. When she wanted to be an artist, we bought her art supplies and sent her to art classes on weekends. When she wanted to be a vet, we let her take care of the horses. It's not like we were telling her she had to become a CEO or a doctor or something. We supported her whatever it is she wants to do. And she threw it all away to be with this guy who, I might remind you, hasn't treated her well at all."

"What's your point, Bill?" Lisa says.

"My point is that we're being reasonable," he says. "We're being perfectly reasonable. We're not saying she can't live her life or that she can't do this thing or that thing. We're just saying that she did something that hurt us, and that she needs to apologize."

Since Sarah moved out, Lisa has moved into her seat at the dining table. Sitting across from Bill at the table left too much empty space between them. Now, in this seat, though it fills out their corner of the table with the plates, the glasses, and the place settings, it leaves the other side of the table an open field.

"Don't you think there's a point, though, where we should just set it aside?" she says. "I don't want to miss my daughter's whole life. We already missed the wedding. I don't care if she's right or we're right or whatever."

"She'll come around," Bill says.

"But what if she doesn't?" she says. "What if Sarah doesn't ever call us? What if she never speaks to us?"

He stops, dumbstruck for a moment. She can see it in him, that he doesn't have a response because he's never thought about it. He's never wanted to. He's kept himself from asking those questions.

"I just never saw our daughter becoming this kind of person," he says.

"Bill, don't be so hard-headed," she says in more of a whisper than a yell.

Tears start to break through. Her voice begins to falter. The sun is beaming in through the window, and she is afraid that it will only make more visible the fact that she is holding in her crying.

Another moment, and then he speaks something as well-formulated as he can muster. "We're being reasonable here," he says. "She can call us anytime. We haven't gone anywhere. All she has to do is call us, and we can talk it all out."

In this newer seat, Lisa can see the stable out at the edge of the window's frame of view. The doors are open, and she needs to remember to close it before night falls so that the horses don't get cold. She can see Lorna's head sticking out over the gate, looking out toward the house. Her face holds no emotion, at least no emotion that a human being can see, especially not from this distance. As much as she can look into Lorna's eyes, she cannot tell if Lorna feels any sense of her mortality, any sense that she is old, reaching the end of her body, the end of what her bones and muscles and heart and lungs will sustain.

"Okay," she says after a time. She feels a rage toward him, a rage toward this calm that he holds onto that so clearly hides something more like weakness, that keeps them from their daughter. She looks back at him. His gaze is strong—all unflinching eye contact, as if in every second he is making the conscious decision again and again to continue to stare into her. He will not be governed by some buried sense of self-consciousness.

After dinner she walks out to the stables. There are four stalls, one for Lorna, the other three for horses which they board for neighbors whose kids ride on weekends. It's warm during the day, but it still cools to near-freezing at night, so she tosses blankets onto the horses to get them through it.

Her phone buzzes with an incoming call. She stops what she's doing to check it. It's Sarah.

"I hope you'll come out and see us soon, mom," Sarah says. "We'd love to have you over for dinner. We've got more pictures to show you."

"I think you'll have to talk to your father," Lisa says.

"Oh," Sarah says. "I don't know."

"He's your father," Lisa says. She picks up a brush and begins to comb Lorna's mane. The horse's hair is already smooth enough—all of the horses are well groomed—but she likes the feeling of it, the back-and-forth movement of her hands over the warm nape of the animal's neck. "He'll want to hear from you. He won't be angry."

"Why should he be angry?" Sarah says. "You're the ones who missed the wedding."

"You know how he feels," Lisa says.

"Look, Mom, I would like it if you two would come by," Sarah says.

"I understand," Lisa says.

"He's my husband."

There is silence. The horses are quiet, gentle against the coming dark. It is only a bare orange lightbulb that lights this space, a light that Lisa turns off at night. Horses have much better night vision than humans, but she wonders just how much they can see in the deep darkness of the closed-off stable. If there is nothing to look at, what do they see?

"You should come by to see Lorna," Lisa says.

"I should?" Sarah says.

"You really should," Lisa says.

There is silence on the line. Lisa runs her hand across Lorna's face. Her eyes, the brown pupils, the lids folded like a person's, surely they express something real and internal, a memory of those hills still snow-covered, the field pocked with frozen mud.

"I don't like the idea of sneaking around when dad's gone at work," Sarah says. "It's not a good position to put you in."

Lorna nuzzles her nose against Lisa's neck. She exhales, pushing her internal warmth out to Lisa's face.

"I just think you're going to want to say goodbye," Lisa says.

"I know," Sarah says. "But look, you both missed our wedding. And I know that wasn't your decision. It was dad's."

"That's not true," Lisa says.

"I need him to apologize," Sarah says. "How could he do that to us? How could he do that to you? I don't think I can go over there and pretend like nothing's wrong."

"It would break your father's heart if you didn't see Lorna one more time," Lisa says. "He might not say it, but it's true."

"Why the hell wouldn't he say that?" Sarah says. "Of course it would break his heart. It would break my heart too. That's what's wrong with this whole thing, Mom."

"It's just hard for him to express," Lisa says. "I don't know."

"You know that's bullshit," Sarah says.

"I know," Lisa says.

They say goodbye and hang up. Lisa finishes blanketing the horses, then she walks over to the door. She switches off the light, then she lingers in the dark, listening for the quiet hiss of the horses' breathing. Then she walks out and slides closed the door and returns to the house where Bill is probably already falling asleep in front of the television.

It's a week later and already the temperature has gone up another few degrees. There is no snow left on the mountains, and the grass has gone entirely green across the valley. The vet is on his way, and Lisa brings Lorna out into the field next to the road where Bill is already waiting.

Lorna is slower now, visibly slower than the day before. Her breathing is heavy, but in the warm afternoon air, it remains invisible. Lisa wonders what the path of the breath out of her nose would look like in winter, if it would dissipate in round clouds now rather than the fast, pointed breaths of the horse's earlier years. She is still standing—that's good. But her time has come.

Bill pets Lorna on her head and across her back. Lisa remembers that the man is not, in all circumstances, so rigid. They had bought the horse together, after all, not long after Sarah was born. It was Bill's idea. Some households get a dog, others a cat, but they rounded out their family with a horse—something Sarah might ride across the field, up into the hills. Lisa runs her arm around his, and he pulls his other arm around her and envelopes her. She begins to cry.

"It's not right that this kind of thing has to happen," he says.

"It's not," she says.

His arms are heavy, his back stiffened, not relaxed by time as she once thought it would be. She is afraid to see what he will do here, if he'll look away from it, if he'll turn a hardened face out into the fields. Or worse, perhaps—he'll watch the whole thing without any expression at all. The thought deepens her sobs.

"Do you want to go inside?" he says. "I can stay here with her."

"No," she says. "I can't leave her."

"I'll be here," he says. "She won't be alone. It's going to be hard to watch."

Perhaps he doesn't want her to see Lorna buck and collapse, that this would be traumatic. Perhaps he thinks that this act should be left to the men. Perhaps he does not want too much emotion filling the air.

"I just don't think you're going to want to see this," he says.

"I know what's involved, Bill," she says. "I've been around animals my whole life. I've seen all of this before."

"I know. You're right," he says. He turns to her, and his eyes are glassy, the moisture on the verge of something more. "Maybe I'm the one who needs to stay inside for this one."

"No, Bill," she says. "We are staying."

She looks into Lorna's eyes, and it's impossible for Lisa to think anything but that this poor old horse is afraid. She feels the weight of her breathing, the fatigue, the life slowly seeping from her muscles. She feels the tiredness of old age coursing through Lorna's bloodstream, depositing itself into her major organs, staging a coup against her sinuous body. The beloved horse needs someone to be here with her, someone who can lie down next to her as her eyes begin to droop and her lungs begin to still.

"Bill," she says. She relaxes her stance. Her feet had driven themselves hard into the ground. "Sarah is having a baby."

"What?" he says.

"She's keeping it," she says. "We're going to be grandparents."

"I don't—how did you hear about this?"

"She told me," she says. "She called me, and she told me."

"I thought we had an agreement," he says. "Has she apologized to you?"

"No," she says. "And she won't."

"So you're taking her side?"

"I'm not taking a side," she says. "I don't know why you think there are sides, Bill. She's our daughter. Don't you want to be with her?"

"Of course I do," he says. "But this isn't the way. She's got to apologize. Where is she? Why isn't she here? If she cared about this family, she would be here. Where is she?"

"You won't allow it," she says. "Because you're being stubborn. You think you're being logical. But you're just being stubborn. You're why she's not here."

"Look, Lisa, I understand what you're saying," he says. "But she made a horrible decision. And now she's having a child with him? And they're going to put food on this baby's plate with what, some job dunking fries? I can't just turn a blind eye to all of this."

"But you are turning a blind eye—to all of this, Bill," she says.

"If we just let her get away with—"

"She's not getting away with anything, Bill," Lisa says. "You're going to remember this moment, and you're going to remember that our daughter, the daughter who was once a little girl who rode this goddamned horse, is somewhere else right now because you won't allow her to be here. And then she's going to have a baby, and you won't be there for that either. Do you understand that? Do you see that that's what you're doing?"

"Lisa," he says. There's hurt in his voice, but Lisa isn't sure if it's real or if it's something he's put on. "It's a tough situation. But you'll see soon that we're doing the right thing. It makes sense."

"Fuck your sense," she says.

A truck pulls off the main road onto their property. She thinks, for a moment, that it could be Sarah, that Sarah has come here to be with her family, to be with Lorna. But then she sees the logo on the side and the trailer it's towing.

They watch as Lorna lies down on her side, her torso hammocking all that is inside her, the lungs that will soon still, the stomach that will never again churn with hay, the heart that will cease beating.

Lisa kneels down by Lorna's head. She strokes her mane, gazes into the glassy eyes whose lids blink slower and slower. "It'll be over soon, girl," she says.

And Bill is on his knees as well, on the other side of the horse's head. He holds his palm over the horse's side, watching it rise and fall with each lengthening breath. He doesn't speak, but Lisa can see that his breathing is slow like this horse's, that they are almost in sync. But soon the soft rise of his shoulders gives way to heaving, and tears well up in his eyes. He takes his cowboy hat off of his head and places it on the ground.

Lorna's breathing slows until it ceases entirely, and then they are left with the empty body of this old horse. Heat will emanate from her for a while longer, but she will be far away from them down the road, by then, on the back of this vet's trailer.

Lisa looks into the horse's still-open eyes, but she senses that when the breathing stopped, so did the entire existence of the horse in this body. Lorna is no longer here, but somewhere else. The vet is sitting in the truck, giving them privacy, but she doesn't want to waste his time. She stands up, but Bill continues to kneel on the ground, his hand still on the horse's body. She nearly says something, but then she decides that he should have his space.

Bill sits with the horse for a long time. Lisa looks off into the hills, much like the vet, giving her husband a few final moments with the animal. The slopes have not simply gone green; in the arid savannah of inland California, some have already begun to turn to gold. The hills wait for months for the winter to release, for the snow to melt and for temperatures to warm. But then it is only a matter of weeks before the temperate yields to the oppressive, and they wait yet again for relief. Lorna had seen her final spring.

After a time, Bill stands up, too. He replaces his hat, and he walks over to Lisa, looking out onto the hills with her. The vet gets out of his truck and walks over.

"Would you like some more time?" the vet asks.

Lisa waits for Bill to respond.

"No," Bill says. "We're all done."

"I can take it from here," the vet says. "You two go ahead and do your thing."

Lisa turns back to give Lorna one last look, and Bill does too. Bill removes his hat again, holds it to his chest. As they turn back toward the house, he does not put it back on, but instead holds it at his side, Lisa's hand in his other.

"I'd better tell Sarah," Lisa says.

Bill doesn't say anything at all, and that's about the best response Lisa thinks she'll get.