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Show 191 Tamara's mother was worried that she might follow Steve and shoot herself out there. So was I. She had a gun, and she wasn't doing well. She was either politely tolerated or despised in most places, including work, because she cried so much. She could cry for nearly the whole day, or not at all for three days before she'd smell Steve on some of her clothes and lose it for a week. I wondered how her eyes survived, that must have been so physically draining. She was not too easy to talk to, either. "Cold weather lately," you might say. "Oh, I guess. I've been more concerned about the death of Steve. Two months, three weeks and one day ago." There were only so many of those encounters that someone could take before they started checking their watches. Tamara saw things so vividly it was as though Steve were laying there in front of her at all times, his body tired and beaten. In the Salt Lake desert, she could shrink it down to logistics: time, speed, gun. She didn't want to ask questions about what she'd done wrong or what she could have done better. While she didn't want anyone to tell her there was nothing she could do, questions like that go back too far and down too many roads. Maybe she was tired, maybe it was the grief, maybe the prescription drags. Approaching Exit 88 she nodded off and her car tilted out of the speeding lane into the slow lane and then off 1-80 entirely, rolling three times over the dirt |