Her father's truck was parked at number 14, Warren's door. More beer, she thought, feeling the cooled concrete under her bare feet. He always said, "Never walk around barefoot, like a vagrant. Never sleep outside, like a wino. Never talk to strangers, like an idiot."

But she loved walking in the dark, breathing in the air the desert plants released when they opened up to drink the dew, seeing the gray-gold flash of a coyote. Day was night. Her father had told her that, because he'd been in the desert a long time.

She followed the sound of his laughter now, passing three dark windows to sit against the wheel of his truck. A slice of light from the open slot of their door fell onto the dirt past her feet, but for a few minutes she heard only the loud click of the channel changer. Then Warren said, "Whoa, honey, that's the one for me. True redhead."

Elvia saw a fingernail crescent moon over the mountain now. She didn't want to imagine what the redhead was doing. More than what she'd done with Michael, and nobody in those movies ever got pregnant, she bet. She heard furious clicking, the remote working hard. Warren said, "Turn it back to the redhead, Larry. Come on, gimme the thing."

"Fuckin TV's so beat up you can't see shit anyway," her father said.

"Last time I seen you and that chick Callie, she said you were buyin a big-screen," Warren said. "Now you're broke. What the hell happened?"

"Callie was sketchin, man, she'd smoke anything. Sudafed, Efidac. Her teeth were fallin out-she was bones. Remember Dually, with the Ford?"

"He still movin the stuff out there?"

Elvia remembered Dually's face, in the doorway, on the couch. His beard a black scarf over his neck, his blue eyes threaded with blood. "Dually came around last week, said Callie owed him big time. No more fronts. Cash or crash. I ain't gettin killed for her."

"She's got a kid and all," Warren said, and Elvia heard the remote crash against the wall.

"Not my kid," he said. "My kid's in our room watchin MTV. I didn't hear you feelin sorry for Callie a minute ago when I gave you some of what her friend cooked up. She's hella sorry she let me have it. Callie'd crack your head open to get that outta your brain."

Warren's feet scraped, and Elvia hoped he was only picking up the remote. She heard him sit back down in the creaking chair. The cicadas clung frozen to the stucco. The TV gulped and clicked again, and Warren said, "Yeah, man, the redhead. Go, baby." Her father must have grabbed the remote, because Warren said, "Shit, Larry."

"I'll watch it, but I don't want the damn sound on. They're already screwin, so what the hell's she screamin you ain't heard before?" Elvia heard the rasp of her father's match, the popping of his lips when he drew in the first breath. Blue hairs of smoke reached out the door.

Screwing. That's what she and Michael had done. Not love. Crying over their mothers. Then screwing. What would he say if she found him in the arroyo now? How would she get that far, walking? Her father and Warren might sketch for days on Callie's speed, work long hours at the quarry. She'd be stuck in the room, where she couldn't hide her belly forever.

"Man, look at that ass. And the tits," Warren said.

"All fake. They probably make ass implants, too."

"Check out the Oriental chick," Warren said. Her face? In the few glimpses she had gotten, Elvia had seen flailing arms and legs, once a screaming mouth stretched thin as a rubber band, but never a face. Her neck was suddenly hot when she thought of how she had opened her eyes and seen Michael's eyes closed, his face empty like he was far away even though he lay on top of her.

"Oriental chick is short. Just like Ellie's mom," Warren said. "I remember her. Real little, black hair down to her butt."

Elvia held her breath. Her father was silent. She tried to imagine a face. A whole face.

"Man, I seen this show about women from the Philippines, bitches like slaves, cook and clean and roll over." Warren coughed. "I don't know how you screwed up with Ellie's mom. Shit, you saved her ass from Mexico. You hid her from immigration, right? Weren't you both workin in Rio Seco, in that linen plant out there on Bellgrave Road?"

Her father was quiet again. Another glowing cigarette butt landed near the first. He would never tell me this. Because he doesn't want me to find her. Bellgrave Road.

"I wanted to help Sara out, you know, help her get a life. Be American. She never even left the house, she was always so scared," her father finally said. "But then we show up, after that Wyoming job, remember? And she's got all that goddamn cactus on the table. Why the hell's she feedin the kid cactus?"

"Cause she liked it."

Elvia tried to see herself eating cactus with her mother. Tell him. Tell me.

"Cause I didn't give her enough money."

Warren laughed. "We used to party. She was a Mexican. All you had to do was fuck her and give her some dinero now and then. Better than she'd a got in TJ. She should a been happy."

Her father muttered, "That's the thing. She was all sad. Never looked happy. After all that time, she was scared of me. Like everybody else. And I didn't get it."

"She didn't get it. I remember you makin her say her address and she couldn't even do that." Warren made his voice high and slow. "Twanny-fi ten Joo-cow." He laughed. "Wasn't that it?"

"Yukon. We lived on Yukon."

Elvia made herself breathe. Twenty-five ten? Yukon. Maybe her mother had gone back there, left a note. Maybe she was living there again, waiting for Elvia to find her. Why wouldn't he ever tell her the address? Or the one in Tijuana? Now she had three places to look.

"I wasn't doin right back then. But I didn't expect her to bail. Ditch her own kid."

Elvia rubbed her cheek against the tire, feeling grit score her skin. Why would her mother be on Yukon Avenue now, when she didn't want to be there before? When she'd gotten tired of me, too. She saw Jeff's chest smeared with chocolate, his gums shiny-red when he cried and cried.

"Why'd you go lookin for Ellie anyway? A girl and all."

"Hey, my dad left my mom when I was a week old. What did I fuck up so bad the asshole had to bail? What did I do?" Her father's words flew hard against the screen. "I never seen him. My mom said he had green eyes. She had blue eyes. That could be a lie. How the hell would I know?" Elvia heard another hissing match. "I didn't want anybody messin with my kid."

He'd said that to Callie, too. Warren said, "Half the time looks like she can't stand you."

Her father laughed. "She's a kid. She ain't supposed to like me. I take care of her, I feed her, but I don't gotta like her all the time, either." He pushed out more smoke. "Maybe Florida's the story, man, start all over. I heard they're lookin for guys to lay gas line in a swamp. Remember we did that in Texas, that one time? Be good to get Ellie outta all this."

Elvia touched the sand on her jaw. She wasn't going to Florida. She was going to find Michael. Tell him about the baby. Then they were going to Tijuana.

Her father was nearly whispering now, and she crouched forward on her knees. "You see all that makeup on the redhead? The last time I saw Sara, she had all this blue shit on her eyes. Looked like she was blind."

She stood up, knowing that she really had seen her mother at the steering wheel, turning with shiny-wet cheeks, closing her eyes like two pools of water under the dark brows. She remembered this. Not a dream. Her mother's mouth painted red. The keys flying. The lighter.

"Change the fuckin channel, man, I'm tired of thinkin about women."

An air conditioner shivered next door. Warren said, "Always a woman fucks you up, Larry."

Elvia padded quickly down the concrete, passing through harsh circles of bulb light. She wouldn't cry. She lay on the sheets that smelled like strangers, burying herself in her loose hair. Soon her father would come inside to check her breathing, to lean near her and whisper, "Ellie? Everything cool?"

"Ellie?" She heard him, like always, before he left her breakfast. "It's on the table."

She twisted from the sheet. He sat in the chair, lacing his work boots in the dim light. "Just be cool till we get situated again, okay? I'm goin to the quarry with Warren. In a couple weeks we'll figure out school. But for now, check out the TV and keep the door locked."

She didn't answer. He said, "Stop worryin about Callie and that girl. That's the past. Soon as somethin's over, it's the past. I learned that real quick in life, and you have to learn it, too."

She heard the truck start up. The breakfast burritos looked like sleeping babies in their thin wrappers. She drank the carton of milk, ate one burrito, and slid the other in the jacket she tied around her waist. He'd left ten dollars. She wrapped her rocks in a tee shirt: the black onyx she'd found near the highway, the red sandstone, the smooth, pearly stone Michael had said looked like her own personal moon. When someone knocked, she froze. Maybe it was Dually. He wanted money, or her father. But a woman's voice said, "Hello?"

Elvia opened the door. The woman's face was dark as her own, her braid so long it twitched over her hip. Between her brows was a red circle.

"You are sleeping here?" the woman asked. Her voice was light as water drops from a fountain. "I thought there was only a man. Would you like me to take your towels?"

Elvia shook her head, and the woman said, "Are you all right, my dear?"

"Yeah," Elvia said. She stared at the paint, like a tiny lipstick kiss on the woman's forehead. Had her mother left a red kiss on her face? Had someone washed it off, when they found her?

The woman's long skirt shifted like sheer curtains at her feet as she turned to glide down the cement walkway. Indians, Warren had said.

"Hector said there's Indians everywhere in Mexico," Michael had told her, the last time she saw him. "Maya, Yaqui, Zapotec. About a hundred kinds. You got no idea what she is?"

Her mother, Callie, her father-they all left people, over and over. Elvia had left the little girl behind the blind hospital doors. She didn't even know her name. Jeffrey-would Callie leave him one day, if Dually or someone else promised her what she wanted? What if Dually found her here? If he keeps messing up, I'm gonna get killed, she told herself. But he never left me. I can't go to Florida, stay in another motel room, get bigger and bigger. I have to figure out what to do. I have to tell Michael.

The Indian woman sang softly outside. Elvia touched her belly and then drew her hand away. Nothing. She felt nothing.

Michael hadn't left her. He'd been arrested. Elvia shivered, touching the air conditioner slats that shuddered like the truck radiator, as if someone were driving into the room.

She walked in the shade under the eaves until the last room, number 20, and then on the frontage road to the quarry in the hills. She remembered the asphalt, pale as water, the edges crumbled into sand. Brittlebush shook in the wind, and broken glass sparkled so hard it hurt her eyes.

Her father always said no one would come looking for him in this hellhole during August. She stood in the feathery shade near the only tamarisk tree by the quarry fence. The mountains were like heaps of charcoal ash behind the quarry, except where a wide vein of green ran down the valley. Elvia knew from listening to her father and Warren that flash floods laid down enough stones and gravel to sell to contractors who built fake streams through golf courses and retaining walls to keep coyotes and scumbags out.

Standing right here, three years ago, she'd watched her father for hours, sure he would never come back to the motel for her. She'd sorted piles of stones. In Sandy's rock book, she'd found weathered granite, sandstone, quartz. Igneous, metamorphic. She'd decided to be a geologist, like the men she watched who came to the construction sites and tested the soil underneath.

Trucks came and went now; exhaust mixed with dust. Her father and Warren got out of a truck bed and began loading chalky stones heavy enough to make the wheels bounce. Landscaper's favorite: creamy weathered granite, rounded by the river.

Her father saw her when he was finished and stopped to light a cigarette. "Ellie. You're gonna get heatstroke. Go back and watch some TV."

His face was dark in the shade of his hand, like a visor at his brow. Elvia said, "I've got a headache. I left my Advil in the truck. Can I have the keys?"

He came toward the fence. "You okay? Did you eat?"

She wanted to cry again. I feed my kid every day. I take care of her. I don't have to like her. "Yeah, I'm okay," she said, and he handed her the keys.

"Get out of the sun before you fry your brain. Just cause you're tanned dark, you think you can stand the desert during the day. You can't. Bring those back."

She clutched the keys. His voice was still as fast as it had been the night before. His arms and cheeks were dark red, dry as brick dust. She turned when he did, and walked back down the quarry road.

In the sandy parking lot, the sun was like a hot wire on the part in her hair. In the truck, staring at the side mirror, she saw his eyes, her mother's lips. She tried to imagine her father's face if she handed him a baby browner than herself, with Michael Torres's cheekbones like tiny shields.

A finger tapped her on the arm, the nail edged in black. Two Mexican men grinned at her, saying something in Spanish. She said, "Fuck you. Get the hell away from me." The same thing she said when boys spoke Spanish to her at school and grabbed her arm, when white boys said, "Hey, beanorita."

Everybody knows Fuck You. Universal language, Michael's friend Hector had joked.

She turned the wheel so sharply a gold scarf of dust rose behind her. She'd only take the truck for a few days, until she found Michael, until she went to Tijuana. She knew the dust would blend in with the quarry's haze, and her father wouldn't even know she was gone until it was too late to stop her.

lasso.

Mental floss. That's what Callie would say.

If you floss with barbed wire. Her friend's home-cooked shit felt like that right now, roaming through his brain, sawing back and forth, catching thoughts on the metal spurs.

Each boulder was thirty, forty pounds. Over and over. Bend and swing it up into the landscaper's truck bed. Weathered granite for some rich asshole in Palm Springs. Then Ellie asked him for the keys, and he stared at her braids. Her face through the chainlink fence.

Braids. He used to swing her around, her braids flying, in the yard on Yukon.

Sara used to wear one braid down her back. Like a thick rope backbone.

He'd come back from a long haul to Wyoming one week, and Sara was on the couch with Ellie, braiding her hair. They didn't see him at the door. "Lasso," Sara was saying, and Ellie reached up her hand and touched the braid. "Lasu."

He asked a Mescan guy at work. "Trenzas," Carlos said, shrugging.

"Lasso?" Larry said. "What about that?"

"That? Indian talk."

Now Ellie walked toward the parking lot, and then her back was lost in dust. Larry finished the weathered granite, his head ripping with the movement and heat, a glinting deep inside his brain. The roof had lifted off the fuckin house. Fire burned blue and purple like he'd never seen. All for this barbed-wire home-cooked shit. All gone now. Each pipe somebody smoked, all the dollars they had to give up, and then they had to load rock and load concrete and load pipe and drive, drive, drive all the way to wherever, so some guy could hand them more dollars so they could buy burritos and Bud and more smoke, so they could load more rock.

All day. Every day. Dollars and Bud and smoke. Move it. Let's go. Come on.

"Come on, Larry," Callie always said. "Come on, babe. Let's go. Let's do it."

Jimmy put him on the bulldozer, sent him up the quarry road to pull a load of river rock. Larry drank some water, thinking he'd wait for Elvia to come back with the keys. But Jimmy said, "Come on. Let's get to gettin."

Larry drove the dozer in the fierce swirls of dust and wind and white heat. Ripping back and forth in his brain. Like last night.

When he'd left Warren's room the night before, the half-moon was already out, hanging like acrylic fake rock in the sky. The kind builders loved for edging out a fountain or flower bed. Fuck. Back here at the quarry. At the Sands. Fuckin August. Square zero again. Start all over.

Callie's home-brewed shit left a taste like mossy metal on his teeth, in his throat. Callie was probably coming down about now. She was probably cussing him ten ways, hauling Jeff on her hip like he was a big rock, pacing the living room.

She'll find somebody else. Just like she found me. Leave the kid with somebody for a night, comb her hair, tie up her shirt, go to a bar, and tell him all about it. Like she told me-her car broke down in Blythe, and she was just tryin to get on her feet. Rest for a couple weeks, then go to LA.

I listened to that shit. But the next fucker might not. So she can tell him what she likes to do. Get him in the car. That'll work. For a while.

Long as he don't make a baby. I ain't makin no more. Sure as hell, only one I ever made is in there sleepin. Got her MTV and boots and burgers. Nobody can say I don't take care of mine. He swallowed again. Mossy green metal. Like a horse trough. He hadn't seen a horse trough since Colorado. He'd drunk water from one once, when he was about fifteen and desperate. Where had he run from? A foster home. Six or seven boys, all beating the shit out of one another while the mother watched TV in the basement. Ward of the state.

Ellie was never gonna be a ward of the state. She was somebody's daughter. Forever.

His teeth hurt. How did smoke hold the taste of metal? Long fuckin day, longer night. Drove corrugated to the site, smelled that truck exhaust. Made those damn pipes in the yard, smelled that glass melting under the acetylene torch. That air freshener evaporating. Drove all the way to Sage, smelled that shit coming from Lee's house. Her old man talked a lot of shit. Lee's husband was in Tehachapi for two years. Intent to distribute. And this dude sat there smokin those More cigarettes, smelled like burning dirt. Then he took off when the house blew.

Those kids weren't his. What the hell did he care?

Shit. Ellie was in there. She almost got it. All Callie cared about was her supply. Ellie isn't her kid. And she doesn't give a shit about Jeff. Swear one time in a bar, somebody told me she tried to sell him once. White baby with blue eyes-four hundred bucks.

He opened the door and sat on his bed. The dusty, high bathroom window lit up like a dirty headlight each time a car passed on the freeway. I can't believe we're back here again. Where we were when I first got her from the foster lady. Sandy Narlette.

He remembered how Elvia had looked the last time he'd swung her in the yard, back on Yukon. A place she'd never see, because he didn't want her to know. Her braids. Why did the braids piss him off back then? They didn't look American. Too long, too tight. Something like Mexican.

He'd thought Sara wanted to be an American. Hell, she crossed over, right? She was working, right?

All those times I fucked up, she didn't leave. Where would she go? I always came back. I always brought dinero. It was so fuckin hard to get that dinero, every week. Layin gas line in Wyoming, fightin snakes in Texas when we put in water pipe.