So now all of Delphina’s old insecurities kicked in: What if Donald didn’t come after all? She had already told Angie that they were going to the dance. Would they have to go alone? Was there enough gas in the pickup to make it all the way to Vamori and back? When the clock turned over seven o’clock and Donald still wasn’t there, Delphina plunged into a fit of disappointment. He wasn’t coming. All men were just alike, and Donald Rios was as bad as the rest of them.

Then, at a quarter to eight, almost an hour after he was supposed to be there and after Delphina had already given Donald Rios up for lost, he drove into her yard. She had the porch light on and she could see that his Chevy Blazer was shiny and freshly washed. With all the dust in the air, people on the reservation considered the act of washing a car either as an exercise in futility or as a deliberate rain dance.

When he knocked, Angie abandoned her pal Dora and went racing to the door to let him in. Donald Rios was a large man. Standing on the shaky wooden step outside Delphina’s door, he looked more than a little silly in his dress-up boots and shirt, holding a child’s pink-and-yellow pinwheel in one hand and a wilted handful of grocery-store flowers in the other.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he said with an apologetic smile, handing the pinwheel to Angie and the flowers to Delphina. Angie took her present and raced back to the TV set with barely a thank-you while Delphina opened the door and ushered him inside.

“Indian time?” she asked, accepting the proffered flowers. She didn’t have a proper vase, so she put the flowers in a water glass and set them on the kitchen counter.

Donald laughed sheepishly. “I had to do something for my mother,” he said. “If it had been real Indian time I would have been a lot later. Are you ready to go?”

Delphina nodded.

“Oi g hihm,” Donald called to Angie. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t need to say so twice. Pinwheel in hand, Angie came on the run, ready to do just that-clamber into his Blazer and go.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

Jack Tennant was relieved when Abby emerged from the bedroom wearing a turquoise-colored pantsuit and a pair of sandals. He wouldn’t have objected if she’d turned up in a dress and heels, but he knew the slacks would make for an easier wardrobe change when it came time to slip on the jumpsuit. Abby still had a fair amount of midwestern modesty about her. Stripping down and getting naked or nearly naked in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t come easily.

That wasn’t to say it wouldn’t ever happen. With women you never could tell. Jack had the air mattress along just in case his powers of persuasion outstripped Abby’s objections. After their sweet afternoon nap interlude, what they did later on that evening to celebrate their anniversary was no longer such a pressing issue, at least not as far as Jack was concerned.

When they got in the car, Jack insisted that Abby put on the blindfold, and she was a good sport about it. Hoping to keep their destination secret for as long as possible, he headed west on I-10 toward Marana rather than going south through town. In Marana he turned off on Sandario Road. That was as much as Abby could take.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” she said, whipping off the blindfold. “Where in the world are you taking me?”

The jig was up.

“To the reservation,” he said. “Out beyond Sells.”

“But there aren’t any restaurants-” She stopped abruptly because she got it. “You found one, didn’t you,” she said accusingly, but beaming as she spoke. “You found a night-blooming cereus out in the desert somewhere. That’s where we’re going!”

Jack nodded, because Abby was right, up to a point. After months of using his phantom foursome to cover his activities, after asking and gaining permission to explore various people’s lands both on the reservation and off it, Jack hadn’t found just “a night-blooming cereus.” He believed he had found what might be the granddaddy of them all!

The deer-horn cacti on display at Tohono Chul sometimes had as many as seven or eight blooms on them. This one, an old giant that had wound its way up into an ironwood tree, had at least a hundred buds on it. Jack had been afraid something would go wrong. Maybe the plants growing in the wild would be on a different schedule from the ones in captivity, as it were. So he had come out and checked on the buds on his plant and then had made secret visits to Tohono Chul to make sure the buds there seemed to be progressing along the same schedule. And they had. They were.

He was sure that tonight when the flowers bloomed in the garden, the ones in the desert would be blooming as well. There, hundreds of people would be in attendance. Here, there would be only Jack and Abby and maybe Thomas Rios’s son, Donald, who was about to become engaged himself. When Thomas had told him about that and asked if Jack would mind if Donald and Delphina stopped by for a little while to see the flowers, Jack hadn’t had the heart to object. After all, this was Thomas Rios’s land to begin with.

“Absolutely,” he had said heartily. “The more the merrier.”

And he had meant it, too. He had made sure there was enough food for everyone and extra dishes and silverware just in case. He worried a little about the wine. He knew you weren’t supposed to have liquor on the reservation, so he might wait to pour that until after Donald and his girlfriend left to go to a dance. There would be a full moon tonight. There would be plenty of time for him and Abby to savor the flowers, the night, and the claret.

Abby reached over and gently lifted Jack’s hand off the steering wheel. She held the back of it to her lips, kissed it, and then returned it to the steering wheel.

“Thank you,” she said. “You really are a remarkable man.”

Jack smiled at her. “Words to warm a man’s heart,” he said.

“But how did you manage to pull this off? Did someone find it for you?”

“Don’t expect me to tell you all my secrets,” he said. “I may want to surprise you again sometime.”

Smiling, she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. The nap they had both missed this afternoon was starting to catch up with her. Truth be told, it was catching up with Jack as well, but he hummed a few bars of their special song, “Solamente Una Vez,” to keep himself awake.

Everyone else knew the song as something schmaltzy about the Thousand Guitars, but a young dark-eyed singer with a local mariachi band had translated it for them that night after they had stood before the justice of the peace: “Only once in a lifetime does the light of love fall across your garden path.”

And tonight the garden is the desert, Jack Tennant thought. And the light of love will be a full moon.

So while Abby slept, Jack drove. She snored a little, but he was far too much of a gentleman to tell her that.

It’s one of our little secrets, he thought to himself. He was incredibly grateful that, at their supposedly advanced ages, there was still enough room in their lives to have secrets. And fun. For a moment, and it was only a moment, Jack felt a fleeting bit of wistfulness for poor Irene, because she hadn’t lived long enough to find that out. Even if she had lived long enough, he suspected Irene never would have figured out the fun part.

That was another place where Abby had Irene beaten six ways to Sunday.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

Jonathan was working his way through his second take-out burger when Jack Tennant backed his Lexus out of the garage. Then, with him holding the passenger door open, a woman came out through the garage and let him take her hand as she got into the car.