Traditional rose and banner on a forearm

The rain never came to Needles this year, so I have stopped waiting for it and started counting the cacti instead. Mrs Okafor at the diner says the road past the salt flats will be shut by Thursday if the wind keeps up, so I am writing this on the back of a menu while the coffee goes cold. You will laugh, but I went back to that little shop on the strip and let the man with the spectacles finish what he started. He drew the rose the way you liked it, red as a stoplight, with leaves that looked pressed in a book, and he set the year underneath in lettering so small I had to squint to read it back to myself.

It hurt more than I expected. He kept telling me to breathe, as if I were a horse being shod. I told him I had been breathing for thirty years and was getting rather good at it. He only nodded and dabbed the blood away with a paper towel, and for a minute the black outline looked like it had been traced in the sun.

That banner is the only promise I ever made that I meant to keep, and you were the one who told me to get it done before I lost my nerve. So consider this my reply. I have not lost my nerve. The bus leaves at six and I will be on it, with your old road maps folded in my bag and the window down, heading east toward the coast where you said the roses grow wild in the cliff gardens.

If the road closes, I will sit at the diner and wait for the wind to die, the same way you used to wait for me to finish my sentences. Write to me at the post office in Blythe. I will check every morning.