Machine Dreams

place to park and they’d discovered it by accident. Danner hadn’t been to the plant her father once owned since she was a child, but one night the previous winter she and Riley had driven past the entrance. Curious, Danner asked Riley to drive up the steep dirt lane to the yard. They sat looking, then stayed for an hour. The plant wasn’t too far from Nedelson’s Parkette, on the highway to Winfield; it was off a side road called Graveyard Road, and up a hill. There was an office building and two prefab garages, and the tipple structure where materials were poured from above into the rolling barrels of the trucks. What materials? Sand? Gravel? Danner wasn’t sure, but she had a vague memory of seeing it happen. Now the mixers sat haphazardly around the lot as though their drivers had left them abruptly. They were big rugged trucks, worn and snaggled. A few might be the same trucks her father had owned. Since the year before, he’d sold cars at the Chevrolet garage in Bellington, and little mention was made of his work at home.
    Last winter, the snowy plant had looked ghostly and beautiful by night. The piles of dirt were white mounds, the trucks dusted, the tipple a square snow-hung tower with the sheer white mountain of gravel above and behind it. Riley and Danner could see the lights of the town from the plant, and the Winfield road snaking past the Parkette. Cars had moved on the road, long beams of their headlights played out across falling snow. Always, the plant was deserted. Graveyard Road led only to the cemetery; no police patroled it, no one drove by.
    Danner and Riley were so sure of their privacy that sometimes, in summer, Riley spread a cloth and they lay down so they could see the stars. The plant was a kind of moonscape by August—not a scrap of green. The dirt of the yard was blond and dry, and puffed like smoke when Riley skipped stones across it. Still, after dusk and into the night, there was the same private quiet as in winter. Tonight they stayed in the car, and the crickets madea staccato chiming in the brush. Danner thought of Mitch Concrete as a distant planet still revolving in the past. Hymns should sound in the background of the emptiness, very low, wisps of hymns. Riley kissed her forehead, her temples, her throat; she remembered the ministers, their bodies so attentive, singing to each other.
    “Well,” Riley said. He had pulled away and was watching her when she opened her eyes. He touched the bridge of her nose and the lines of her lips. “I bet your parents did a little spooning here. Maybe they still do, on the sly.”
    Danner shook her head. “They were already married when he started the plant. Anyway, my parents haven’t slept together in years.”
    “You don’t know what your parents have done.” He put one arm along the back of the seat and bunched her straight hair in his hand. “Jean and Mitch are all right. Parents always make it seem they don’t have a sex life.”
    “They’re all right to you—they like you. That doesn’t mean they’re all right to each other.”
    “You’re wrong,” Riley said.
    She wasn’t, but there was no point explaining. Danner supposed she knew more than most daughters; her mother had no one else to talk to. It was curious—Riley never wanted to admit that her parents didn’t get along, as though they were his parents.
    He was looking at her. “Listen,” he said, “I have a present for you. I’m not going to give it to you until your birthday, but I have to show it to you now so you won’t be too surprised.”
    Danner smiled. “Riley, if it’s for my birthday, don’t give it to me now.”
    “I have to,” he said. He took a small white box out of his pocket. “Put out your hand.”
    She did. He put the box on the flat of her palm, then opened it for her. Inside was a gold ring cushioned in white velvet; the center of the ring was a small gold heart set with a diamond chip. “Oh,” she said, “it’s beautiful.”
    He circled her wrist with his fingers. “Danner, I want us to be engaged.”
    “I can’t,” she said, nearly whispering, “you know I can’t.”
    He put his finger gently against her mouth. “I don’t mean we should tell your parents. As far as they know, it’s just a present. That’s why it’s a small diamond—when we tell them, I’ll give you a different ring.”
    She looked at the ring in confusion. The chip of diamond glittered. Riley kept talking. How could he see her face and just