* * *
The emergency foster home was a split-level on the north side of Elko belonging to a couple named Brandt, who had five children, two of them their own, and a refrigerator covered in chore charts. Mrs. Brandt gave Josie a toothbrush still in its package and a towel that smelled of somebody else's laundry soap. A sixteen-year-old named Kayleigh, who had been there since June, lent her a gray hoodie and said, "The first night's the worst one. After that it's just bad," and then turned over in the other bed and went to sleep.
Josie lay awake and listened to the furnace click. She thought about the kitchen window over the sink and the screen lying on the frost. She thought about how she had checked the doors every night for seven months and never once the windows, and how she had told herself the rotor in her pocket meant she'd thought of everything.
On Sunday Ms. Ochoa took her to see Aitona. He was in a room at the hospital with his feet wrapped up like loaves of bread and a nurse who called him Mr. E., and he was sitting up, eating Jell-O with great concentration. He knew her. Not the right year, not the right anything else, but he knew she was his, and he held her hand the whole twenty minutes and told her the Jell-O was very good, she should have some, they had green.
In the hallway afterward, Ms. Ochoa said, "There's a bed at Ruby Ridge. The memory care place off Mountain City Highway. They had a waiting list of fourteen months." She tucked her reading glasses into her hair. "Your friend Mrs. Quintero trained the director of nursing over there in about 1998. I gather she made a phone call."
"Is it nice?"
"It's clean. They have a garden. Some of the staff have been there twenty years, which tells you something." She hesitated. "It's twenty minutes from the Quinteros' house in Cutter Springs. If you were living there, you could go every Sunday."
Josie looked at her.
"I can't promise what the judge will do," said Ms. Ochoa. "I want to be honest with you about that. But I've been doing this nineteen years, and I don't get to say this very often. I'm going to recommend that you go home. Or as close to home as I can get you."
* * *
The hearing was Monday at ten at the Elko County courthouse on Idaho Street, a heavy old building with columns and a flag snapping in a wind that came straight off the snow.
Mrs. Brandt drove her. They came around the corner from Fifth Street and Mrs. Brandt said, "Oh my word," and slowed down, and Josie looked up.
There were motorcycles parked along both sides of Idaho Street, nose to the curb, all the way down the block. More than she could count. Not just the Ruby Iron. There were patches she'd never seen, clubs from Wells and Battle Mountain and Jackpot, a Christian riders group from Winnemucca, a dozen bikes with veterans' flags on their sissy bars. There were pickups too, and ranch trucks, and a white Ford with a circular saw in the back. Nobody was revving anything. Nobody was making noise. A sheriff's deputy stood on the courthouse steps with his thumbs in his belt, looking at the whole long gleaming line of them, and he looked less like a man expecting trouble than a man trying to figure out what to tell his sergeant.