Free Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick

music books. She set them on the side of the music stand. “Once you
     learn to apply yourself, to dig deep and push for excellence, you can do it with anything:
     cooking, gardening, writing. It’s like learning to use a muscle—only this is a psychological
     muscle.”
    “How come I don’t have it?”
    Her mother hesitated, as though debating if she should acknowledge that it is true
     that Caro has never done anything that has required her to apply herself 100 percent.
     “Everything you’ve done, you’ve been able to do with a small piece of yourself. It’s
     a different experience when you have to use every fiber of your being.”
    “So how did you learn?”
    Her mother came to sit next to her on the couch. She picked up Caro’s hand and, sensing
     no resistance, held it lightly. “Actually,” she said, “it was with you. When you were
     a baby. You were a little colicky, not terribly so, and it didn’t last that long,
     but I was very anxious, which you sensed, and that made you even fussier. Your father
     was a resident and hardly home. On a resident’s salary, we couldn’t even consider
     babysitting help. I didn’t understand then that the real problem was my own lack of
     experience being mothered. I had to figure out how to soothe you, on no sleep, with
     no inner model or help. That was the first time I had to dig deep. I did it again
     with your brother, and then again when I wrote my thesis. Eventually, it became ingrained,
     a way of being.”
    Caro hands the last of the dinner plates to Eva. There is an almost ecstatic look
     on Eva’s face as she glances up at the ceiling through which Myra’s playing can be
     heard. “Your mother, Omar wants her to teach him. Do you think she will let me watch?”
    Caro imagines her mother on the piano bench, Omar beside her looking down at the keys,
     Eva on a nearby chair with her eyes fixed on them. The image leaves her with a queasy
     feeling. “You’ll have to ask her.”
    She gives Eva the dishwasher detergent and turns to scrubbing the sink.
    24
    The Searchers begins with TEXAS 1868 against a black background.
    “It was filmed in Monument Valley,” Adam whispers to Caro. “Do you remember, we went
     there once with Dad?”
    “In Arizona?”
    “Ford, the director, loved Monument Valley. It was totally unspoiled in the fifties,
     the farthest point anywhere in the country from a railroad. He thought the landscape
     looked more like Texas than Texas itself. He would set up tent cities and live out
     on the desert with his actors and crew. He and John Wayne were great buddies. They’d
     finish a bottle of wine together and then spend a couple of hours smoking cigars and
     playing cards.”
    Last summer, Adam had taken Rachida and Omar on a long-planned car trip from Detroit
     to Riggins, Idaho, with the intention of showing his wife and son the land he mythologized
     in the Westerns he wrote for third-world markets. The week before they left, wildfires
     had broken out, ravaging hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Crushed at the idea
     of canceling the trip, Adam had convinced Rachida to persevere. They arrived in Montana
     to find that entire mountainsides had burned in a matter of days and flames were leaping
     across Route 80. The craggy peaks of the Crazy Mountains, usually crystalline clear
     in August, were hidden by sooty gray sky.
    The trip culminated with a rafting sojourn on the Salmon River led by a guide Adam
     had found on the Internet: a former Deadhead turned ardent Native Americanist who
     met them dressed in a blue loincloth, his hand-crafted drums under one arm. On their
     first day, they drifted past hills orange with flame, the fleeing elk and deer and
     moose racing along the banks of the river. Late afternoon, the Deadhead guide set
     up camp on a sandy beachhead. Omar raced up the dunes, whooping as he flung himself
     down the mounds of white sand, while Adam squinted into the smoke at prop planes passing