* * *
Natalie sat down on the posing bench because it was the only thing in the room she could trust to hold her. Adam did not sit. He stood by the dark softbox with his arms folded, and then unfolded them, and then, after a while, sat on one of the chairs Calvin had set out, on the very edge, as if he might need to stand again at any moment.
She told it badly at first. She started in the wrong place, with the hospital, and then went back, and then forward again, and Adam said, "Slow down," not unkindly, and she stopped and breathed and began again at the beginning, which was a town called Sterling, out on the eastern plains, two hours from Denver, where the sugar beet trucks rolled down Main Street in the fall and the wind never entirely stopped.
Her name then had been Natalie Pruett. Her father sold farm insurance and served as a deacon at the Church of the Nazarene, and her mother kept a house so clean you could hear it, and there were two younger brothers who played football and were good at it. Natalie had been the smart one, the one who was going to leave. She had a scholarship to the University of Northern Colorado and a plan to become a speech therapist, and she had a boyfriend named Josh Kettering who worked at his uncle's tire shop and drove a red Silverado with a cracked windshield and was, at nineteen, the gentlest and least reliable person she had ever known.
"I loved him," she said, and Adam looked at the floor. "I'm sorry. I did. I was nineteen. He used to drive me out to the reservoir at night and we'd lie on the hood of the truck and he'd name constellations wrong on purpose to make me correct him."
She got pregnant in the spring of her freshman year. She found out in a bathroom at a Safeway in Greeley, alone, and sat on the closed lid of the toilet for forty minutes holding the test like a thermometer, waiting for it to change its mind. When she told Josh, he cried, and said he would marry her, and said they would figure it out, and for three weeks he called her every night. Then he called less. Then his uncle's shop lost a big contract, and Josh's cousin said there was work in the oil fields outside Midland, good money, and Josh said he'd go for six months, save up, come back for her. He sent two letters from Texas. The second one said he was sorry, that he wasn't ready, that he hoped she would understand. After that, his phone number stopped working.
"Did your parents know?" Adam said.