Tucson, Arizona is presented through the contrast between its civic center and Brandon Walker’s home near Gates Pass. The city provides the setting for a public celebration of Gayle Stryker and Lawrence Stryker, but also for the private routines and encounters through which Brandon’s stalled life begins to move again. Its narrative importance lies in bringing those public and personal worlds into close reach.

Downtown and the civic stage

Brandon and Diana Ladd drive east from Gates Pass into downtown Tucson, Arizona, for a benefit gala honoring Gayle Stryker and Lawrence Stryker as the city’s Man and Woman of the Year. The event is held at a community center, where Lawrence sits on the dais and Diana gives an introductory speech. Her praise is rooted in personal history: in the early seventies, while teaching on the Tohono O’odham Reservation, she had lost her husband and was caring for a new baby, and the Strykers had stayed by her when few others did. She credits them with turning a single idea into a powerful tool for good.

The occasion places Brandon in an uncomfortable social position. He intends to attend and remain agreeable, but has decided not to speak to the Strykers. The ballroom’s candles, banquet tables, and ceremony frame their standing in the city; Brandon’s deliberate silence hints at the distance between public honor and his own unresolved view of them.

Gates Pass and Brandon’s domestic life

Brandon’s home near Gates Pass is the quieter counterpoint to downtown. In April 2002, at sixty-one, he swims in a newly installed heated lap pool beneath a clear sky. He swims for endurance rather than speed or a counted distance, stopping when he can go no farther. The warm water eases the trouble in his right hip and left knee, though he resists his doctor’s suggestion that he consider replacement surgery and hopes to avoid prompting Diana to arrange another appointment.

The house also reflects the couple’s different working lives. Diana is in her study, struggling to begin her next book; Brandon, retired after a failed reelection bid for Pima County sheriff, has adjusted to being mostly out of the loop while her publishing work continues. When the security-gate phone rings, he assumes the visitor may be making a delivery connected to her business and keeps swimming, leaving Diana to handle the interruption.

Home as the setting for renewed purpose

The Gates Pass home is where an earlier phone call continues to shape Brandon’s present. Six months after that unexpected call, he remembers it while gathering glasses and ice and pouring tea in the kitchen. At the time, Diana was away on a book tour, and he had felt bored, irritable, and diminished by being seen chiefly as her husband, despite their improved financial security. The call, as Brandon remembers it, rescued him from that self-pity and despair.

After speaking with Emma Orozco, Brandon spends a sleepless night at home, excited by the prospect of having a purpose again. In the living room, he finds Emma looking at a basket by Rita Antone: a two-foot-wide medallion woven with the Man in the Maze. Its maze is made of undyed yucca root, giving it a rusty red color that resembles dried blood. Nana Dahd had explained the cost contained in that distinctive material: the yucca had to die. In this domestic setting, a woven object and its history meet Brandon’s renewed engagement with Emma’s case, joining the city’s intimate spaces to the investigation that will draw him back into the world.