The day the stranger blows into Anton's Pass, a dust storm is rolling across the desert. 

Dolores trudges through town, the neck of her poncho pulled high over her nose to fend off the sand already gathering in the air. Wren had tried to warn her against making the delivery until after the whole thing blew over, arms crossed in the doorway of the barn, looking up at Dolores with a pinch between her ginger brows. 

“Honestly, Dori,” Wren had said, “Shepherd will survive without a fresh shipment of tomatoes for a few more hours. Goddess knows they don’t have an overabundance of mouths to feed.” 

“It’s on the schedule. I can do it.” Dolores didn’t even pause in her task of moving crates from the pallet onto the flatbed cart. The thought of Wren inconvenienced bubbled like tar in Dolores’ stomach. She could feel herself getting angry over something that had not even come to pass. “Besides. Storm ain’t due for a few hours yet.” 

“And you got a degree in meteorology since dinner?” 

Dolores shook her head. “I can feel it. Here.” She touched her knee joint. “Here.” Her shoulder. She hesitated for a moment. Pushed on. “And here.” She skated a hand along one of the longhorns that grew from her head before curling it into a fist, resisting the urge to shake the feeling from her fingers. She returned to her task with a renewed tension behind her movements. “I’ll be fine.” 

She heard Wren sigh wearily from behind her. “You know I’m just gonna worry even if you’re right.”

Dolores froze in her movements at that, chancing a glance over her shoulder at Wren’s apprehensive face. A million things to say reared through her mind. Instead, she repeated herself: “I’ll be fine.” 

Wren had thrown her hands up in surrender. “You win, kid. Knock on my door before going back to your place so I know you made it home in one piece, alright?” 

Dolores rolled her shoulders as she stood up, moving out of the barn without glancing down at Wren as she passed her. “Yes ma’am,” she mumbled, knowing she had no intention of following through. 

Now, as she pushes the flatbed ahead of her, she takes some satisfaction in knowing she had been right– she will be fine, the visibility in town still enough that she can easily get a fix on the cluster of buildings that add up to the meager downtown just across the dried up creek. She can make out the faint glow of the open sign in the tavern window, the weathervane atop the library creaking back and forth in the wind, the woman standing at the end of the road. 

Dolores slows to a stop. There is a woman standing at the end of the road. She emerges from the desert like she had been carried in by the wind. One moment, there was no one else around. The next, there she is. 

She’s covered in dirt, a red bandana tied over her nose and mouth, her long dark hair fastened into two thick braids. One hand is gripping the front of her duster coat shut, the other keeping the tan cowboy hat atop her head from blowing away. Even through the haze in the air, Dolores is certain she has never seen this woman before; in a town with a resident population that hovers around a hundred, Dolores is even more certain she’d have noticed her. 

The way the woman hunches over as she walks rankles Dolores. She draws a hand under her poncho to feel the blade of her axe against her hip, eyeing the stranger warily. Is she just trying to protect herself against the wind? Or is she hurt?

Maybe she’s just tired, Dolores thinks. No one has ever really made a point to stop in Anton's Pass unless a short rest has become unavoidable. With some bitterness, she feels as though she should have heeded Wren’s instruction to hang back. A suitable welcoming committee she is not. 

With a hand firm on the handle of her axe, careful to turn her hip so the wind won’t blow her poncho up to expose the weapon, she psyches herself up. 

Just ask. Just ask if she needs directions. Don’t be an asshole. Muttering to herself, she kicks the wheel brake of her flatbed before rounding to stand a few paces ahead of it, keeping her eyes fixed on the woman the whole time. She raises her free hand, and just as she is about to call out, the woman’s head tips up and their eyes meet. 

They both freeze. 

Even across the distance, Dolores can see the sudden rigidity in her posture, the woman lurching to a stop so sudden she half-trips over the toe of her scuffed brown canvas shoe. The hand holding her hat moves to yank the bandana covering her face down, and now that she is standing upright, Dolores can take in more of her. Her eyes are wide and unblinking, which strikes Dolores as unnerving in the shit weather. She stands as if at attention, and for the first time, Dolores notices the woman is clutching something against her chest. When she brings it up to her mouth and says something into it, eyes never leaving Dolores, she figures it must be some sort of tape recorder. 

Dolores’ hand falters, uncertain if she should return it to her side. She hadn’t accounted for this outing to be so fucking weird. 

Still speaking into her tape recorder, the woman begins to take a few stilted steps backwards before rushing forward without warning, striding towards Dolores with purpose. 

What the fuck? Dolores reels back. What the fuck is happening? Her fingers flex against the handle of her axe and the motion sends her careening into rationality. Dolores wonders what she must look like to this outsider– the ominous hooded figure silently lurking in the street, staring at this woman for no discernible reason. Gods, Dolores would be trying to make herself look big and intimidating, too. 

In a scramble to diffuse the situation, Dolores hurriedly unbuttons the fastenings of her hood around her horns, letting the wind push it back to expose her face. She waves a hand uncomfortably. 

“Excu—”

“Excuse me!” The wind carries Manuela’s voice from where she has come clambering onto the porch of the inn, the front door slamming against the outer wall. She is followed closely by her daughter Ada, Ada’s hand around her mother’s elbow to keep her held back underneath the cover of the building. 

The commotion grabs both of their attention. 

“Excuse me, Señora! Why don’t you come in out of that storm? I’m sure wherever you’re gettin’ to can wait a few hours. We got plenty of free rooms if you ain’t in a hurry!”

As Manuela shouts, Ada hustles down the wooden steps, arms thrown over her eyes to block out the sand. She doesn’t even offer the woman the illusion of a choice before she’s ushering her up the stairs. They only get one foot each on the porch before Manuela is fussing over them, brushing sand off the woman’s arms with a handkerchief and lamenting loudly over her lack of bags, how hungry she must be, how a warm shower followed by a warm meal will fix her up quickly. . 

Dolores takes it as her cue to keep moving. She unlocks her cart and only makes it a few steps before she hears an indignant shriek of her name in Manuela’s best disapproving voice. 

“Dolores Roughwaters! That better not be you outside in this weather!” 

Dolores mentally scrambles for any way she could possibly spontaneously disappear into thin air and avoid a lecture altogether. Tragically, she comes up empty. She turns reluctantly to face Manuela and hates how instantly she feels chagrined at the sight of the older woman’s steely glare. 

“What the hell are you thinkin’?” Her beratement of Dolores does nothing to interfere with how she frets over the stranger’s sandy braids. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” 

I had no intention of running into you at all, Dolores considers saying. Not in the mood to be at the center of another gossip scandal for disrespecting her elders, she gestures wordlessly to a crate of corn. 

Manuela pinches the bridge of her nose, muttering something too low for Dolores to catch. She sternly points a finger. “You get to that tavern and then you get yourself home! No lingering! But if this storm picks up before you’re done, don’t let me hear Shepherd tell me about how you decided to walk out of her tavern anyways or we’ll be having words! You understand me?” 

The sudden urge to shout back, You’re not my mom! surges through Dolores. She grits her teeth against the heat flooding her cheeks, thankful for how much of her face is still covered, and offers a two-finger salute in acknowledgement, mostly because she knows it’ll annoy Manuela. 

Manuela flaps a dismissive hand in her direction in response, grumbling as she turns her attention back to the newcomer. The bite in her voice melts into a gentle coo as she guides her inside. Before she can be steered fully over the threshold, the woman glances back over her shoulder, eyes snagging on Dolores once again. They look at each other for a long moment before the door slams shut, and Dolores is left standing alone in the street. 

She continues onwards to the tavern, grateful her destination involves hard liquor. 

– – – 

Dolores makes it home minutes before the storm comes rushing through in full, leadenly tugging her boots and poncho off, leaving them in a dirty pile by the door. The residual light filtering through her hand-dyed linen curtains disappears between one moment and the next, casting her cabin in total darkness. It’s times like this that Dolores finds gratitude in living alone– when she can collapse onto her bed in the middle of the afternoon without an excuse, free to curl in on herself as the day catches up to her: the weight of the flatbed, the weight of navigating polite conversation in town, the weight of staring at the lamp glow in Wren’s window for a full thirty seconds before continuing past her pathway without making the promised pitstop. 

 She rolls heavily onto her back and squirms out of her jeans, kicking them to the floor while she blinks tiredly up at the ceiling. The face of the woman at the end of the street flitters through her mind, her strange open curiosity and those worn brown shoes.  It strikes Dolores distantly that those shoes wouldn’t be suitable for a long hike in the desert– not sturdy enough, not enough support for a planned pilgrimage. She wonders where the woman might have come from with shoes like that on her feet, and wonders if she had to have left there in a hurry.   

The thought hits Dolores somewhere deep in her chest, tugging at something that makes her ache. She shuts her eyes against it, and drifts off to the sound of the storm outside, crackly and hollow, hissing like radio static.