She was twenty-six and already looked like a woman worn down by three different kinds of weather. She had blonde hair that sun and rain had turned almost the color of straw, hands thin but hard, pale gray eyes, the kind that always seem ready either to laugh or to break, never exactly still. She wore jeans faded at the knees, boots that had seen enough road not to trust the ground easily anymore, and carried a duffel bag that held two changes of clothes, a comb, an old photograph of her mother, and a harmonica wrapped in a red bandana.