The Homecoming Baby. Kathleen O'Brien

with squared off edges. “Oh, sure,” she said. “It’s out of business. Until you meet another cute wounded puppy who needs saving.”

      “Nope.” Celia sat on the edge of Trish’s desk, swinging her bare feet. “Never again. I’ve learned my lesson. No more losers. No more melancholics or workaholics, momaholics or liars. If I ever go back to dating—and I may not, I may become a nun—it would be because I found someone who doesn’t need any fixing up. No scratches. No dents.”

      Trish raised her eyebrows. “The perfect man.”

      Celia nodded. “That’s right. It’s the perfect man from now on. Or no man at all.”

      Trish leaned over, hoisted the large box of rejected dresses under her arm and gave Celia a smile that was half-teasing, half-wistful.

      “Then you’d better get on out to Red Rock Bridge and wish for one before the moon goes down,” she said. “Because here in the real world, there is absolutely no such thing.”

      CELIA DID GO. Though she had been tired, when she got home she realized she’d been cooped up in the office too long. She needed fresh air and open spaces.

      She brought along a foot-long veggie sub and a bottle of white zinfandel, a romance novel and a flashlight. She ate half the sandwich and drank a quarter of the wine. She read a few chapters by flashlight.

      Then she walked out to the edge, right to where the formation grew narrow, forming the fragile “bridge” between the two red rock columns, and sang corny Broadway love songs at the top of her lungs.

      She gazed toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, so silent and endless in the moonlight. Then she lay on her back and dreamed up at the purple sky, which looked like one of Angelina Linden’s dresses, velvety smooth, sprinkled with silver sequins and the round cameo brooch of the moon.

      She heard a coyote howl in the distance, and she howled back, then laughed at herself because after that every tiny whispering noise startled her, as if the coyote might be loping her way, answering her call.

      And then, after she stuffed her uneaten food and undrunk wine back into her bag, she stood up and walked back to the edge of Red Rock Bridge. She looked up at the moon, and she made her wishes.

      She wished for rain to come and end Enchantment’s drought. She wished for courage for Rose Gallen. She wished for rest for Lydia Kane, prosperity for the clinic and swift, healthy deliveries for every pregnant woman in their care.

      She wished, especially, for peace to come to Trish Linden, who deserved it. After all that, it seemed too greedy to wish for the perfect man, so she agreed to take one with a little dent, if necessary. A tiny scratch that didn’t go too deep would be all right.

      Chuckling at her foolishness, she started to climb down from the bridge. But then she remembered one last thing.

      “And if you have time,” she called into the vastness of the purple night, “please let every member of the Women’s Club wake up with nasty red zits on their pointy little chins.”

      PATRICK KEPT TELLING HIMSELF TO TURN around. Go back. Give up. You must be nuts.

      He had work to do. Deals to finalize. A client to visit in Santa Fe. He did not need to be squandering good gas and putting hard miles on his favorite Mercedes crawling through these winding mountain roads looking for a place called Enchantment, New Mexico.

      But he kept ignoring himself—proving that the inner voice was right. Yes, sir, he was definitely nuts.

      He couldn’t even find a decent radio station to help keep his mind off his own thoughts. He dictated a few notes into his digital recorder, but eventually even that grew old.

      Finally, he decided to relax and take in the scenery. In fact, he was amazed by the verdant green mountains around him. He hadn’t spent much time in New Mexico before, and his mental image had been a cliché born of too many Westerns—flat, dusty-red deserts littered with bleached cattle skulls.

      The colors here surprised him. Lots of red, yes, but not dusty and dried out. Instead, pinks and blues subtly mingled with the pure blue sky and the yellow wildflowers to create a rich sense of innocence. Like a box of crayons in a happy two-year-old’s hands.

      And all this space…endless vistas down mountainsides and across valleys.

      He wasn’t sure he liked it. It felt kind of…lonely.

      He was a city man. For him “land developing” meant taking one highly coveted acre of land and erecting a building on it that would allow the maximum number of people to imagine that they “owned” it. It meant beehives and shopping centers and high-density ratios. It meant top dollar and bottom line.

      So if he’d been expecting some kind of epiphany—an interior “Eureka!” that said this was his secret heritage, that he belonged in an adobe house with a horse in the front yard—he’d been sadly mistaken. He thought it was nice, but nothing inside went “click.”

      To his annoyance, the only “click” he heard came from under the hood of his car. At least twenty minutes outside Enchantment, something began rhythmically slapping as he drove, and he smelled the metallic odor of water scorching against engine parts. The needle on the temperature gauge began to climb and finally steam rose from around the edges of the hood.

      “Damn it.” He was going to have to stop.

      He looked around. Where the hell was he? He could just imagine himself calling the auto club and asking them to come find him in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the side of some mountain.

      He whipped his cell phone out of its carrier, looked down and cursed again. He really was in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t even have service up here. Probably one of these picturesque trees was blocking the signal.

      He lifted the hood, stepping back to avoid having his face steam cleaned. He was no mechanic, but even he could see the problem. A hose dangled like a dead black snake. And, even more ominously, he could see water bubbling out of a hole in the side of the radiator. He stared at it, then glanced one more time at his cell phone.

      Still no service. Probably out here real men didn’t need auto clubs. They probably just fashioned makeshift radiator belts out of grapevines and kept driving.

      Okay, now what? Enchantment was still about ten miles away.

      But he remembered passing a small road sign just a few yards back. It had directed him to turn left to get to some place called Silverton. Whatever that was. He unfolded the map and finally found it. Very small, but definitely there.

      And it was only about a mile away. That he could handle in a heartbeat. San Francisco might not have classes on how to turn a rabbit’s pelt into a radiator belt, but it had health clubs, and he jogged five miles a day at his.

      As he walked, he checked every few yards to see if his cell service had returned, but no luck. No cars, either. This must be the most deserted stretch of road in the entire state of New Mexico.

      He had decided to stop at the very first house he saw—the suburbs of Silverton were fine, any structure that had a telephone was fine. But there were no suburbs. Suddenly, without warning, without signs or billboards or outlying development of any kind, there it was. Just a small, ornate, old-fashioned metal plaque.

      Silverton.

      He kept walking, but his mind had stalled. What the hell was this? It wasn’t even a town, really. It was just an X carved into the land. Two small, crisscrossing streets of dilapidated old buildings.

      Some of the structures had obviously been vandalized. Whole walls of wood had been stripped away, and doors stood in their isolated frames, entryways to open air. Some of the buildings were leaning toward the ground as if they wanted to lie down and rest. A few seemed intact, but they all were completely, unquestionably deserted.

      Deserted. He stopped in his tracks. By God, he had stumbled onto a ghost town.

      He should have been furious. There