Acting Badly. Michael Scofield

among the junipers and piñons that rose from the greenbelt. The post that had propped the deck’s outer corner lay broken across a coil of garden hose. Her rattan lounge tilted against a clutch of rabbitbrush. At the base of a Russian olive, its gray leaves fluttering, gleamed a shard of her Chinese urn. “Fuck,” she exploded, anger occluding the buzz that had tickled her vagina. A couple of cottontails, backs arching, scampered under a juniper. The air smelled of trucks and SUVs whooshing along Bishop’s Lodge Road. Snow patched faraway Mount Baldy and the Ski Basin closer by.

      She had just spotted the snapped half of Manny and Joyce’s plum tree pointing like a barbed arrow across the railing guarding their hot tub when Manny appeared in a black vest and long-sleeved plaid shirt. He cinched the lariat of his hat as he strode around the tub sunk in its small deck, fifteen feet from what remained of the Kirkpatricks’ deck. Joyce followed Manny out the door in leather thongs, nubby skirt and sweater matching her blonde mop of hair.

      Behind Lila came Victor’s voice, “What’ve you got here?”

      Lila pulled open one of the glass doors. “Not as cold as I imagined—look at this mess.”

      She waggled her fingers at Manny and Joyce but only Manny waved back. Joyce had thrust her pelvis forward and stood scowling at the severed treetop attached to the rest of its trunk by a strip of bark.

      “Termites or could be dry rot,” Victor muttered as Lila snaked her arm around his thick waist. “Depends on whether—”

      “This was my favorite tree,” Joyce yelled over the drainage ditch, dammed since last night by Lila’s glass-topped table and its bent-in-two umbrella. A few new-growth leaves fluttered from the plum’s nearest branch as Joyce jerked its top upright. “What do you plan to do about this?”