After the parade, Roger said he'd like to attend the Pioneer Day program and Aspen said okay. They gave a classmate, Sandra Faustlich, a lift to the stake center. The three went inside, where it was cool. The rows were still half empty and an organist practiced traditional pioneer hymns.

Roger asked how Aspen had gotten the welt on her face.

"Do I look pretty bad?" she said.

"It's quite a mark," he said. "Does it sting?"

"Toby hit me with the cord of his sheep shears," she said. "it was an accident. He went bonkers when people began to clap and shout. He was popping the cord like it was bullwhip."

"Sheer tomfoolery," Roger said.

"That's right," Aspen said. "I guess that's what a reunion is all about."

"That Toby has got a lot of nerve," Sandra said.

"You can grant him that," Roger agreed.

"Of all the dumb things," Aspen said, tracing the welt with a feathery touch. "Getting my face cut up before the reunion's begun. I'll stand out like a sore thumb."

While the organist rehearsed, Sandra brought them up to date on her life. She and her first husband ran a pizza parlor in Spokane. He got horny with one of the help, and she divorced him and married a sailor in Bremerton. This fellow was soon transferred to Pensacola, and he got to drinking hard and knocked her around and broke her nose. "See how crooked it is," she said.

So she divorced him and married number three and moved to Wickenburg, Arizona, where they ran a TV repair shop. They had three kids, who grew up and left home the way kids are supposed to. But one of the boys wasn't much at making a living, so she had to tell him over and over, "Larry, I'm not a bank. Go somewhere else to borrow money."

Four or five years ago she got bummed out on husband number three. She left him and moved to Phoenix to be near her daughter, who had two of the nicest little girls. She was presently living with a generous, respectful man who wanted to get married. However, she hadn't divorced number three. She wasn't sure if she wanted to risk marrying number four.

"Good thinking," Aspen said.

"Though he seems like the nicest kind of man."

"You never can tell," Aspen said. "With some men it takes a while before their bad traits come out."

"Why not give him the benefit of the doubt?" Roger said.

Aspen scrutinized Sandra's nose. She couldn't see where it had been broken. It looked like the large, angular nose of Sandra's father. It seemed, now that Aspen thought of it, that a lot of her former classmates had their parents' less desirable features. That was what aging did: it exaggerated the enormities of a genetic line.

The Faustliches lived across the street from a small slaughter house at the south end of Richfield and weren't much higher on the social ladder than the Haslams of Glenwood. Mrs. Faustlich was a Mormon of sorts. It wasn't known what persuasion, if any, Mr. Faustlich followed. He frequented a cafe that served beer and he had other bad habits, too. He smoked cigars and swapped stories about the local Mormons with town loafers at the post office.

It was said that Sandra's mother had been the girl most likely to get pregnant in her generation. The same thing was said of Sandra during her high school years. The town seemed to take it upon itself to define such a creature among each generation of the young. The best that could be hoped was that the boy who got her pregnant could be persuaded to marry her.

Aspen's brother Patrick had an older friend who claimed he'd often got under Sandra's skirt in the balcony of the Richfield movie house. On one occasion, the friend had taken possession of Sandra's panties. Patrick had seen these panties with his own eyes. Aspen doubted the story. Rotten boys could steal panties off a clothes line and tell outrageous lies about getting a finger inside a girl while sitting beside her in a crowded theater.

It was a terrible breach of family ethics for Aspen and Patrick to discuss this matter. Brothers and sisters were supposed to pretend the entire world was neutered. They weren't to notice the existence of the private organs of either sex.

In a hurry one evening before going out, Aspen dashed for the bathroom in her panties and bra and ran into Patrick in the hall. Patrick cried, "Hey, buffalo butt!" and slapped her across the rump. Unluckily, Hope observed the incident through an open door and felt obliged to inform their mother.

"Your father intends to say a word to Patrick about his part in this," Adelia admonished Aspen after entering her bedroom early the next morning. "But you need to practice discretion. How's he to learn delicacy if his sister doesn't help him?"

About a month later Aspen and Patrick were at home alone on a Sunday evening. Patrick called Sandra Faustlich the girl most likely. Aspen denounced this title. "You don't know anything about her," she insisted. "She's a very nice person."

That's when Patrick told her about his older friend getting under Sandra's skirt on repeated occasions. Aspen was embarrassed and disgusted. Apparently Patrick was, too. With a belligerent scowl, he retreated from the living room, where Aspen lounged crosswise in an overstuffed chair, reading her civics text.

She was especially embarrassed because during this period she was secretly meeting Durfey Haslam one or two nights a week, and Durfey sometimes did to her what Patrick said his friend had done to Sandra. A few days later she asked Durfey point blank whether he talked about what they did under the sycamores behind Jacobson's drive-in after she got off work.

He said, "Hell, no."

"Some guys talk a lot about what they do with girls," she said.

They stood in a corridor of the high school, and Aspen's question made Durfey miss the numbers on his locker. He looked at her with disdain. "I wouldn't tell that kind of thing to anybody," he said. "That's between you and me." She had been worried that Patrick was trying to tell her he knew who was truly the girl most likely in town. Reassured by Durfey, she relaxed.

The president of the Richfield stake called the Pioneer Day program to order. There was a long prayer and a choir sang "O Ye Mountains High" and "Come, Come, Ye Saints," those haunting old hymns that broke Aspen down no matter where she heard them. Then came orations on the nobility and heroism of the pioneers, whom God had tested with tragedy after tragedy simply because they were strong enough to bear them.

A fierce, grieving thing had come alive inside the Mormon pioneers on the plains and in frontier Utah. A girl inherited it by growing up a Utah Mormon. No matter where she might wander, she wouldn't be able to forget or put away that fierce, grieving thing.

Aspen descended from pioneers on her mother's side. Her great-great-grandfather Armistice Chokling crossed the plains with his wife and two daughters in a wagon in 1849. Later he moved to Farmington and took a plural wife and sired a total of eleven children. One of his sons, Thomas Chokling, migrated south to Richfield and after the death of his first wife married two sisters at the same time. The youngest of these, Caroline Lorimer, was Aspen's great-grandmother.

On her father's side, Aspen descended from Irish immigrants of a mercantile background. "Your father's parents were forced to emigrate for religious reasons, being Protestants in a Catholic land," Aspen's mother said. "It wasn't poverty. They certainly weren't of common stock. Your ancestors were barristers, officers, educators, and merchants."

Horatio Marooney attributed great dignity to the mortician's profession. "We help people in their darkest hour," he often said. Aspen wandered through the mortuary hundreds of times and wasn't afraid of corpses. She knew her father's assistants weren't as reverent as he. Sam Binney stuck a cigar into the mouth of Bishop Orion T. Carpenter after he was in his casket and nearly ready for viewing. Bishop Carpenter boasted in his sermons that tobacco had never touched his lips.

Sometimes mistakes occurred. Once they had the wrong body in the coffin when relatives arrived for the funeral. Another time Horatio hung his new coat in the cloak closet and later saw it on a corpse just as the coffin was being closed and wheeled into the funeral. It was too late to salvage his coat.

Horatio was strong on Adelia's pioneer ancestry. He studied the family diaries and histories and consulted aged uncles and aunts about their progenitors. While on Sunday drives he narrated family stories to the children. His special heroine was their great-grandmother Caroline Lorimer Chokling. He told the story of her wedding day so many times that they knew it as well as he did. It was no surprise he applied the story to Aspen when she had asked Durfey Haslam to the Sadie Hawkins Day Ball.

The girl's choice dance held each spring was named after Sadie Hawkins Day in the comic strip "Li'l Abner." On that day the unmarried women of Dogpatch had the right to pursue unmarried men and, if they caught them, wed them. Aspen told her mother she had asked a boy named Durfey Haslam to the dance. Her mother, addressing envelopes to members of the poetry league, asked whether Durfey was Balis Haslam's son. Aspen said he was. Adelia said she had been in the Haslam home on a Relief Society visit during the Depression. She said the home was unnecessarily squalid-floors soiled, windows without curtains, children in tattered clothes. From what she understood lately, nothing had changed.

"When the Haslams marry," she said, "their wives sink to their level. I've never known of a case where it was the other way around." When Aspen turned to leave, her mother called her back. "I'd like you to cancel your date."

"Okay," Aspen said, "I won't go out with him any more. I doubt he'd want to anyhow."

"No," her mother insisted, "I mean I want you to ask someone else to go to the Sadie Hawkins Day dance with you."

"It's too late. I've already asked him. He's already said he'd go."

"I want you ask someone else," her mother said.

Near evening Aspen cleaned the large pen where she kept her pigeons. She raked manure and other refuse into a pile and shoveled it into a wheelbarrow. A few pigeons watched. The rest had flown away through the open transom at the top. In good weather they foraged all over the countryside.

Her father came to the pen. He said, "Mother tells me you feel embarrassed to have to break your date with Durfey Haslam."

"I can't ask anybody else. He'd know. Somebody would tell him."

"Maybe you shouldn't go this year," Father said. "We could come up with a good reason."

"I don't see any harm to come from going out with him once," she said.

She trundled the wheelbarrow from the pen and dumped its load on the nearby garden. When she returned, her father said, "Your great-grandmother Caroline Lorimer Chokling was a sweet little lady living down in Elsinore when I married into the family. I remember her distinctly."

He didn't have to repeat Caroline's story. Aspen already knew it by heart. She loved the story. It seemed sacred, a parable for the benefit of the descendants of that heroic pioneer woman.

After Thomas Chokling's first wife died, he asked Cyrus Lorimer's permission to marry his young daughters Harriet and Caroline. The wedding party drove to Manti in four or five buggies. In Gunnison Caroline got out of the buggy and set off afoot for Richfield. She said she didn't love Thomas Chokling and wasn't going to marry him. Everyone knew she was in love with a gentile freighter attached to a government surveying party wintering near Marysvale. Cyr-us Lorimer, who was at the head of the procession, turned his buggy around and caught up with his daughter and heaved her bodily into his buggy, and the party went on to Manti and the double wedding took place as scheduled.

Caroline bore testimony that for months after the wedding she was afflicted with nightmares of being bound with cords and chains. One night an angel appeared and cut the cords and broke the chains. She saw how foolish a thing love is and how glorious it is to be sealed by the priesthood to a righteous man.

"Will you break your date with this Haslam boy?" Horatio pleaded. "Will you believe just for once your mother has your best interest at heart?"

Her back to her father, Aspen went on scooping manure into the wheelbarrow.

"What has become of my little Aspen?" Horatio said. "I loved to carry you in my an-ns. And now you're grown up, and I can't do it anymore.

Yes, what had become of little Aspen, who loved her father passionately? She dropped the shovel and turned, sobbing, "Just tell me what to tell him. just tell me."

With some disgust, Aspen noted Sandra Faustlich's beefy legs, tightly encased in nylons with a sheen. Why would a woman with such enormous thighs wear a short skirt? But Sandra wasn't stupid. At least she had managed not to get pregnant when she was a girl.

As she often did, Aspen had come around to thinking about arranged marriages. People said an arranged marriage was as likely to be happy as any other. Certainly that had been true in the case of Caroline Lorimer Chokling. Aspen took Roger's hand for a moment, then laid it back upon his lap. He smiled at her, then returned his rapt gaze to the orator in the pulpit. She did love Roger. Everybody loved Roger. He was so kind and supportive.

Her parents hadn't negotiated her wedding to Roger. She had negotiated it for them. She knew their specifications without error. They couldn't have done a better job.

After the Pioneer Day program they drove to a new church on the other side of town for the class luncheon. There was a noisy crowd inside the recreation hall-all the people who had been on the float and six or seven who hadn't, with spouses and companions.

Durfey and Elaine stood in a comer near the door. Durfey seemed perplexed. Aspen introduced Roger and herself to Elaine, who smiled pleasantly. She was very attractive, just as Durfey had said.

"What do you think of a float with a sheep tied in a barber's chair?" Elaine asked Roger.

"A wonderful bit of theater," Roger replied.

"The sheep died at the end of the parade," Aspen said. "I hold Durfey responsible. He assured me it wouldn't die."

"I was abysmally wrong," Durfey said.

Henry Ross was banging the bottom of a waste basket and shouting that it was time to find a table. Aspen said, "Let's sit together," and led the way to a table. She waited till Elaine selected a chair and took one beside her. Sandra Faustlich and Amy Gilder also sat at their table. Amy said her husband was home in Fresno working.

"It's wonderful to have you ladies sit with us," Durfey said to Amy and Sandra. "In high school your presence was always edifying and elevating."

"You big bag of wind!" Amy said.

Aspen explained her welt to Amy. "I was trying to be nice to Toby, and look what he did!"

"It sort of becomes you," Amy said of the welt. "I thought maybe you'd done it with make-up."

Henry Ross called on John Izatt to offer grace.

"That's a mistake," Durfey said. "John Izatt couldn't say a short prayer if his life depended on it."

After his lengthy blessing on the food, they crowded into two lines and served themselves at the Mexican buffet-tacos, enchiladas, Spanish rice, and so on. There were pitchers of pink punch on the tables but no coffee, tea, or cola. Shirley Sue, who had planned the menu, wasn't Mormon, but in Utah even gentiles picked up Mormon inhibitions.

They conversed aimlessly while they ate. Sandra said someone in Greeley, Colorado, had barbecued his neighbor's cat and eaten it. He was charged with cruelty to animals.

Durfey said, "I agree with the general principle of eating cats and dogs."

Roger looked askance.

"He's joking," Aspen said.

"I'm not joking," Durfey insisted. "Keeping pets in a pampered condition is a violation of sound ecology."

Aspen asked Amy what her husband did for a living. She said he worked for the IRS. Aspen said, rather proudly, that Roger was director of counseling for Deseret Industries from Phoenix to Seattle.

"You make it sound grandiose," Roger said.

Aspen asked Durfey what he did for a living.

"I make my living on fraud," Durfey said. "I'm an insurance investigator. I check out suspicious claims. You can't imagine how many there are to check out."

"You used to say you were going to be captain of a Caribbean cruise ship," Aspen said.

For the first time all day Durfey smiled his old sweet, warm, good-natured smile. "No cruise ship for me," he said. "It isn't waves lapping against a hull I long to hear. What I want to hear is a cow belching up a cud."

Everybody laughed, Roger most heartily of all. Aspen watched Roger's hands at work with his knife and fork. They seemed happy hands. She felt a headache, which seemed to have something to do with Durfey's warm, good-natured smile.

Durfey spoke of the problem posed by wetbacks crossing from Mexico into California. "They are lured by the smell of affluence. Do you want to know the future of Peru, Ghana, or Sumatra? Watch California. As California goes, so goes the world."

"He hates California," Elaine said.

"I will not bite the hand that feeds me," Durfey said. "Where else could a man of such mediocre abilities make so good a living?"

Roger and Durfey got into a conversation about psychometrics. Durfey wanted to know how a person would measure the potential in a given population for cheating on insurance claims. Brightening up, Roger said there were a number of ways of going about it. Durfey seemed impressed by Roger's explanations, and for a few minutes there was no other talk at the table. Across forty years Aspen remembered Durfey bathing in a rushing creek at dawn. She remembered pillars of muscle in the small of his back. Her head throbbed. After the luncheon she'd go to the drugstore and buy a pain reliever.

The conversation about psychometrics went on. Roger's silver hair was combed back with a flourish. From the side his gold spectacles seemed luminous. There had been many good times for Aspen and Roger, many unfeigned satisfactions. Once in a while there had been passion.

On their tour of Europe they had arrived in Nice in time to secure a reasonably priced room. A little before noon Aspen stood on a sunny balcony and said, "Let's go to the beach."

"Which beach?" Roger asked.

"Is there more than one?"

"I'm not sure."

"The topless beach is the one I want."

"I would prefer not to," he said.

She went into the room and placed a towel, thongs, and a one-piece swimming suit into a tote bag. "I’m walking to the beach," she said. "They said at the desk it’s not far."

On the sidewalk she heard him shout. He waved from the balcony and said, "Wait for me. I’m coming too." When he caught up with her, satchel in hand, he said, "It’s not much of a husband who won’t go to the beach with his wife."

The streets were wide and clean, and palm fronds stirred in a breeze. They saw two young men in short-sleeved white shirts, ties, and name-badges, sedately riding their bicycles.

"Missionaries," Aspen said. "I wonder if they’re allowed to go to the beach."

"I would think not," Roger said. "I can’t think of anything more demoralizing to a missionary."

They put on their swimming suits and thongs in a beach house and went onto the sand. Gulls hovered on unsteady wings over the slow, sparkling surf. Though it was barely afternoon, a crowd of swimmers and sunbathers had gathered. Aspen and Roger spread towels, took off their sandals, and strolled into the water. They waded till the sea came to their hips, then swam back and forth parallel to the shore for perhaps a quarter hour. Emerging, they returned to their towels and lay on their backs, absorbing the sun.

Through half-squinted eyes Aspen watch a girl in her teens playing beach ball with a boy who might have been her younger brother. Neither paid the slightest attention to the girl’s bare heaving breasts. Near Aspen, half reclining in a beach chair, was an emaciated woman of middle age. Her long, thin, coppery breasts lolled across her ribs like nippled stockings.

Roger lay with a cap over his eyes. "I’m exceedingly uncomfortable," he said. "I’ll ge grateful when you’ve had enough of this."

"You’re still a missionary," she said.

"I suppose so," he said. "I’m not a hardy spirit, that’s certain."

In time they dressed and returned along palm-lined walks to the hotel. In the evening they had dinner in a nicer restaurant than usual. Roger ordered apple juice in what looked like a wine bottle. Strolling to their hotel, he expounded upon the romance of a balmy night and the sweet scent of small white flowers blooming on ivy-covered walls. While she unbuttoned her blouse, he asked whether she would consider making love.

She wasn’t eager. They had traveled a night train from Barcelona and the clatter of rails had kept her awake. But she said, "Of course."

The truth was, for all her fatigue, those passionate moments with the doors of the balcony open to a half moon were among the most satisfying they ever had.

Henry Ross went to the microphone and began the program. First he thanked John, Shirley Sue, and Evelyn for organizing the reunion. These stalwarts stood, and everyone applauded. Next Henry named the eight classmates who had died since graduation and asked for a minute of silence in their memory. Then Shirley Sue distributed prizes for those having the most children, the least hair, and the greatest distance to travel. Three classmates had nine children each, so they split the prize. Durfey was runner-up for baldest head.

Audrey Gilbert read predictions from the yearbook of ‘51. According to these prophecies, Richard Hunter would become a poet, Janie Schuster a counter-espionage agent, Jim Foreman a prison warden. They stood and told what they’d become—a grocery wholesaler, a housewife, and a baker.

Henry directed others to take a turn at telling their occupation and life story. Durfey groaned and said in a low voice, "Lord, we’ll be here till midnight."

The program went on for almost two more hours. Aspen doodled on her napkin, sometimes glancing at Durfey. His downcast eyes gave the appearance of sleep. Sometimes she watched Roger’s hands, which, as usual, were in repose. She also watched Elaine’s hands, tipped with glossy red nails. Aspen’s nails were short and plain. She never painted them. Elaine’s engagement ring was more expensive than Aspen’s. She wondered what her mother would say about that. What would she say if Aspen said, "You see he did all right after all. He went to California and he makes seventy-five thousand a year."

It was certain Durfey had told Elaine about his early fornications. Aspen didn’t need to hear this fact confirmed. He couldn’t have helped telling his wife. Aspen admired him for that. She hated a person with dark secrets.

Having covered her own napkin with doodles, she reached for Roger’s. Her classmates droned on, one after another recounting what had happened these forty years. Durfey’s face twitched, so she knew he wasn’t asleep. Roger’s hands now toyed with a fork. Elaine’s hands, with those resplendent nails, lay folded in her lap. Durfey was lucky. Elaine was so placid, so serene. And, yes, she would have forgiven Aspen for her part in her husband’s early derelictions.

When all the class had taken a turn, Henry reminded them of the Richfield rodeo that evening and gave directions for getting to Dennis Gunderson’s summer home in Koosharem Canyon for the continuation of the reunion the next morning. In closing they sang the school anthem: "All hail to thee, our high school, the fairest in the land; we’ll work for you, we’ll cheer for you, with head and heart and hand."

On the way out, Aspen and Roger halted every few steps so Aspen could hug a classmate whom she had not yet greeted. Each time she had to explain again how she had gotten the welt.

In the car she said, "Please drive me to the drugstore. I have a terrible headache."

"Now why would you have a headache?"

"It’s this welt," she said.

"Of course," Roger said with satisfaction. "Well, cheer up. I think it’s fading."