Proves you don’t know shit about women, that’s what, he answered himself. You were supposed to understand your wife better than any other woman, right? Obviously, he hadn’t. And he still didn’t know why his daughter had dumped her longtime boyfriend three weeks after Louise bailed on him. Maybe Louise and Vanessa had plotted it together. Maybe it was just in the air, like swine flu.

Bryce Miller still came by the house every week or two. Part of that was bound to be misery loving company. Part of it… Colin clicked his tongue between his teeth: not a happy noise. The sad and sorry truth was, he liked Bryce better than Vanessa. Bryce had his head on pretty straight, even if he was writing a thesis about Hellenistic poetry. Vanessa… Vanessa got touchy. She snapped like a mean dog if things didn’t go the way she wanted.

Colin’s foot came off the gas pedal. Did you just call your one and only daughter a bitch? Unhappily, he nodded. He hadn’t done it in so many words, but he’d done it. Yeah, that was the word for Vanessa. Not as in touchy-feely, either.

Here came the rangers’ station at the south entrance to Yellowstone. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Not bad. This station was manned. Colin pulled up to one of the gates, stopped, and rolled down his window. A smiling ranger in what looked like a Marine drill sergeant’s hat to Colin said, “Welcome to Yellowstone.” That meant Have you paid yet? Colin held up his map and, stapled to it, the pass-good for a week-he’d bought the day before. Nodding, the ranger changed her lines: “Welcome back to Yellowstone.”

“Thanks.” Colin drove in.

The road up from the south entrance ran pretty straight for twenty miles. Colin held to a steady forty-five even so. A couple of cars and a monstrous SUV zoomed past him. The guidebooks warned that the rangers were fanatical about enforcing the speed limit, especially on this stretch of the Yellowstone highway system. Maybe that was pious bullshit. Or maybe…