Night at the Fiestas: Stories

MOJAVE RATS

LAST NIGHT MONICA VIGIL-RIOS HAD LAIN AWAKE, LISTENING to the wind whip across the salt flats and buffet the trailer, imagining intruders with dark intentions outside. They were living in a piece of aluminum foil, Monica thought. That paltry lock wouldn’t withstand a can opener.

And so, as if in retaliation for her ingratitude, the trailer’s heater stopped working. Monica awoke at dawn to seven-year-old Cordelia whimpering from the loft above the dinette. “Mama,” Cordelia said, still half-asleep. “It’s cold.”

“Goddamn it,” said Monica. It was like a scene out of Dickens, she thought: her very own Little Dorrit, failed once again by her feckless parent. An unpleasant rush of guilt came over her, followed by a prickling irritation at Cordelia for causing this guilt, followed, predictably, by a fresh surge of remorse.

It was cold, a dry hopeless cold that made Monica gasp when she slid out of her sleeping bag on the foldout sofa.

“Come on, sweet pea.” She helped the shivering Cordelia down from the loft and tucked her into her own warm bed beside the baby, who was still blissfully asleep, cheeks chilled and pink, the skin at her nose and mouth raw and crusted. “You snuggle close to Beatrice. She’ll be your own personal heater.” Monica slipped on her jacket, wincing at the icy lining, and pushed out into the wind to see what could be done about the furnace.

If only the heat had held on just one more day. Elliot was due back tonight. He’d been away for a week with the car and his rock pick, collecting soil samples, his thoughts locked on some million-year-old landscape only he could see. God, she hoped he’d found what he was looking for.

“I’ll be afraid here all alone,” she’d told him before he left, meaning, “I’ll miss you.”

“Of course you won’t,” he’d said kindly, and they’d all waved as he pulled away, Cordelia shouting to her stepfather, “Goodbye, Elliot! Goodbye!” until the dust settled. As the week progressed, Monica had found herself increasingly lonely, and though she’d read endless stories and done cooking projects and kept chipper for the girls, she’d never felt so stuck or at such loose ends.

Now Monica was furious with Elliot for leaving her stranded, furious with him for not finishing his fieldwork months ago, when he was supposed to. “I was out there for hours,” she imagined telling him, though she never would. “I had to leave the girls unattended.”

When she finally located the furnace on the rear of the trailer, the panel, of course, had to be screwed off, so Monica went back inside to rummage through Elliot’s tools in the greasy storage space under the bench seat. After rejecting several Phillips-head screwdrivers, she finally found a too-small flathead she would have to make work.

Monica went through these motions knowing all the while that once she finally managed to remove the panel, she would have no idea how to begin to repair the furnace. Still, she felt compelled to stay outside as the wind slashed at her face and hair, the screwdriver almost too frigid to hold, stabbing away at the edge of the aluminum panel (which had, it seemed, rusted itself stubbornly in place), as if locating the problem were somehow the same as fixing it.

The sun peered weakly over the Spring Mountains and the salt flats glowed a faint orange. From where she stood, huddled against the trailer, Monica could hear the sign out on the highway, which had come loose from one of its posts and flapped in the wind, a violent, incessant popping. Years from now, Monica thought bitterly, when she looked back on this time in her life, the sign with its faded palm tree is what she’d remember. WELCOME TO FABULOUS GYPSUM!

Fabulous Gypsum! was all exposure and dust, wind and bleak, pale sky, and, at least until Elliot finished the fieldwork that would form the basis of his dissertation on the Death Valley fault system, it was home. The Shady Lanes RV Park was three miles from the town, which was comprised of a school, a post office operating out of a sun-bleached single-wide, and a grocery store with its wall of clanging slot machines. The Lucky Token, the store was called, as if gambling were the necessity and food an afterthought. Faint mountains ringed the horizon, and the cracked flats stretched into the distance, punctuated only by creosote and desert needle.

Finally, Monica gave up on the furnace. Inside, she rejoined the girls in bed, trying to get warm, then fell into a deep sleep until Cordelia stirred beside her. “Shit,” said Monica, glancing at her watch. “Shit, shit, shit.” They were late; already the schoolbus, half-filled with shaggy-headed blond children from the outlying ranches, had passed them by.

“We can run,” Cordelia said encouragingly.

“Honey, the bus is miles away now.”

Cordelia slumped and flung her head back in despair. “But it’s art day!”

Monica sighed. Cordelia would not be spared the cold, and Monica would not be spared Cordelia.

Monica zipped Cordelia into her jacket, tucked Elliot’s old down parka around Beatrice, and turned the stroller on its stiff wheels. “We’re going on an adventure!” called Monica, and the three of them leaned into the blowing grit and made their bumpy way across the dirt expanse toward the bathrooms and the pay phone.

The park could accommodate forty trailers, each with electric and water hookups, but since they’d arrived eight months ago, there had never been more than ten vehicles scattered at any given time. Today there were six. Across the way, the NASA engineer bent, as usual, over the open hood of his truck. He looked up as she passed, and Monica gave a tight smile, acutely aware that she was a woman encumbered with children, carless and alone in the middle of nowhere.

Cordelia, trotting along with her hand on the stroller, waved. The NASA engineer grunted and ducked his head, though when Monica glanced back, he was watching her.

His truck hadn’t run for years, the park manager had told Elliot. When he wasn’t tinkering with the dead engine, the NASA engineer lived beneath the camper shell, the plastic windows murky with things piled against them. Once, when the tailgate was down, Monica had glimpsed the crammed nest of blankets and electronics and engine parts among which, apparently, the man burrowed like a rodent.

According to the park manager, the man had once been brilliant, working on high-tech heat-resistant compounds. This didn’t surprise Monica. He could have been anything: child molester, gambling addict, harmless kook. Why not a NASA engineer? She wondered if Gypsum had been his destination, or if this was simply where his truck had sputtered to a stop.

If only they had the car, she’d drive into town, spend the day in the heated grocery store wandering up and down the three short aisles. After school, she’d buy Cordelia a treat, let her stand at a safe distance and watch the old men at the slot machines. Maybe they’d skip Gypsum altogether and drive all the way to Las Vegas.

“It’s not fair that Elliot gets the car and not us.” Cordelia kicked the dirt.

“You’re right,” said Monica. “It’s not fair.”

“You maybe don’t know this about me, but I’m a kid who loves school.”

Monica catalogued her neighbors, but there was no one she could envision asking for a ride to town. The torpid, obese family in the RV across the way; the desiccated couple with their nylon shorts and extreme low-calorie diet, running endlessly along the highway; the ubiquitous single men as filthy and bearded as miners. When she encountered them, returning a word or a wave in the icy cinder-block bathroom or passing on her walks with Beatrice, Monica couldn’t help imagining sordid stories for them: mental illness, violent crime, shattering personal tragedy. The place caught people like trash in a wire fence, damaged, discarded people blown out of the bright tree-lined towns of America, held here until the wind came up.

Mojave rats, Elliot called them, these denizens of the dust. The Manson Family had camped out here, he informed Monica, had squatted in various ghost towns, lurking in falling wood-framed buildings, carving their names in porch posts and crumbling plaster, before moving on to prepare for Helter Skelter. To Elliot these facts were secondary to the facts about the area’s geology, interesting in their way, but having nothing to do with him.

So Monica held herself aloof, determined that people understand she wasn’t like them. On her walks, she recited poetry to Beatrice. She carried her paperback of Middlemarch with its cover facing out, displaying the nineteenth-century painting. Monica wasn’t proud of her pretentions. But it was so easy to feel disdain for these people, so vital that she not be mistaken for one of them. “My husband is doing research here,” she told the few people she spoke to, and just saying the words comforted her. Research. Husband. These words were her talismans, all that prevented her from sliding into their grim lives. She told herself again and again that her time at Shady Lanes was only prelude to her real life: she would live in a little house filled with books, attend dinner parties with well-traveled intellectuals. She would finish college, the first in her family, maybe even get her master’s. She would be a professor’s wife. Occasionally, Monica even allowed herself to imagine teaching a literature class in a seminar room overlooking a grassy quad. “Come over, have a coffee,” a retired woman from Calgary had invited in the fall, but Monica had declined and afterward had been forced to avoid her. It had been a relief when the woman and her husband fired up their RV and drove east to Arizona.

At the edge of the highway, Monica parked the stroller outside the pay phone, the plexiglass walls of which had been sandblasted into opacity. The phone book covered all of Nye County, but every listing under Heaters, Furnaces, and RVs was located in either Beatty or Tonopah. As Monica leafed through the dusty pages, they flapped and tore. The phone number for the Gypsum hardware store was apparently no longer in service. Just as well, thought Monica dismally; fixing the furnace would cost money they didn’t have.

When Monica looked up, an oncoming semi was growing steadily larger, and Cordelia had drifted away and was inspecting rocks dangerously close to the shoulder of the road.

“Get back!” yelled Monica.

Cordelia looked up, her hands crammed with rocks. “I am back,” she protested.

Just then the eighteen-wheeler passed in a shuddering rush, stirring loose curls of dust along the road. Monica dropped the phone, sending it clanging against the booth, and yanked Cordelia by the arm.

“Don’t you ever—” she started, not caring how much she hurt Cordelia — glad to hurt her, even — but Beatrice, strapped into her stroller as the dust storm blew over her, clutched at her eyes and began to wail.

“Mama!” called Cordelia urgently over the baby’s squalls. “Beatrice has dirt in her eyes.”

“I know,” snapped Monica, and now Cordelia’s face crumpled, her feelings, as always, wounded.

It was pointless to look at Beatrice’s eyes here; each time Monica managed to pull the little fist away and pry one open, a new gust assaulted them. Beatrice arched her back and screamed in outraged pain. “We’re going home,” said Monica, defeated.

“I’m going to be in deep trouble for missing school,” said Cordelia. She stomped along behind, her thick black hair tangled, lips shading violet.

“You won’t be in trouble. It’s my fault.”

“I know,” said Cordelia.

As Monica collapsed the stroller, she glanced at the RV across the way, where the overweight family lived, and for a brief alarming moment thought she saw a pale face in the dim window, watching her. She blinked and looked again: nothing.

Cordelia hauled herself up the metal steps. “So?” she accused. “What about the heater?”

There was nothing frightening about a face in a window, Monica thought, jiggling Beatrice in her arms. Didn’t Monica look out her own windows? Still, Monica missed Elliot, with his electrical know-how, his logic and warm, male bulk.

“Well?” asked Cordelia.

“Today we’re going to be pioneers.” Monica held open the door for her, and the grit gusted through, chattering on the linoleum.

IMAGINING THEIR LIFE in a trailer from the comfort of their rental in Santa Fe (a ten-minute walk from her mother’s house and where she’d grown up), Monica had thought of Mr. Toad with his gypsy caravan. Before Elliot and Monica had married last year, Elliot’s mother had bought Cordelia a beautiful illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows. Monica had never read it as a child, and she, with Cordelia, loved the picture of Toad’s caravan, the bright paint (“canary yellow picked out in green”), snug curtained bed, patterned dishes lined up on shelves. The promise of both comfort and adventure.

Their eighteen-foot aluminum Travel Lite, however, delivered neither. Brown stripes outside, dingy brick-patterned linoleum inside, hideous orange plaid curtains that snapped shut. The trailer smelled of particleboard and dust.

Monica turned the oven on high and bundled herself and the girls into the sleeping loft. This might have been a nice way to spend the morning, cozy and giggling in the nest of sleeping bags with their books. When she wanted to be, Cordelia was excellent company, a watchful performer, making droll observations for her mother’s benefit. Instead, they were all sluggish and irritable. Beatrice whimpered with discomfort while Monica and Cordelia took turns wiping her chapped nose.

“Toad has a heater,” Cordelia observed pointedly. She clawed through the book and indicated the cozy potbellied woodstove on their favorite page.

“Yes,” Monica agreed and sighed, exhausted by the relentless optimism motherhood demanded. “But Toad didn’t have lots of things we have. Radio. Indoor plumbing.”

“Not here. Not here we don’t have indoor plumbing.” Her tone was injured. “Look at Beatrice,” she demanded, pointing to the baby’s unsightly muzzle. “You should take her to a doctor. She isn’t even cute anymore.”

Monica dabbed at the baby’s nose, which certainly did look worse than it was. “It’s dry skin. We live in a very dry place. The doctor will just tell us to put Vaseline on her, Cordelia. Which I’m doing.”

Monica was no fool: she could read the signs of a child in survival mode. Even as a baby, Cordelia had known to fall silent when her parents fought; to this day, if Elliot was curt, she stiffened, wary. Cordelia’s watchfulness made Monica uneasy. Now, with the arrival of Beatrice, her personality had developed into something sterner still. She guarded her sister vigilantly, turned a fierce eye on her mother and stepfather, evaluating their every move. “Too rough,” she’d scold Elliot when he swung the gleeful baby. “Her arms could fall off.”

Beatrice showed no such complexity. The baby laughed often and loudly, and when she was tired or hungry, she wailed with the entire force of her strong little being. The world revolved around Beatrice, and Beatrice was appropriately ungrateful.

Likely, Monica thought, Cordelia would grow to resent this trait in her sister, this assumption that her needs would be met, that the world had a place for her. But for now, Cordelia nestled around Beatrice, her body curved protectively. To keep her from the cold, or from Monica? If Monica wasn’t careful, the two of them would grow ever closer, in league against her.

After lunch — tomato soup that chilled almost as soon as it touched the bowls — Beatrice fell into a fierce sleep: fists balled up tight, brow pinched, her red cheeks splotched and tear-streaked.

“I hope she doesn’t freeze,” said Cordelia.

“Just a few more hours, then Elliot will fix the heater.”

“What if he doesn’t know how?”

“He probably will. And if not we’ll drive to buy a new one.”

Bleakly, Cordelia said, “You love him more than you love us.”

Monica put her arm around the girl, gave a gentle shake. They’d been down this road before. “That’s silly. I love you differently. You two are my precious daughters.”

Cordelia was stiff and muffled under her arm. She was looking at her sleeping sister. “But you love him more than you love me.”

“Want me to read to you?” Monica tapped her Riverside Shakespeare, which she had planned to study cover to cover months ago and still hadn’t touched, except to read aloud, at Cordelia’s insistence, scenes featuring her namesake. Now Cordelia just shook her head.

“I have an idea,” Monica said. “We can play dress-up!” Actually, it was an idiotic idea — it was far too cold to be changing in and out of clothes.

“Fine,” said Cordelia, listless.

Monica dropped down from the loft and began rummaging in the tiny particleboard closet, while Cordelia peered over the bunk. There wasn’t much worth dressing up in. Some scarves: heavy, knitted, utilitarian. A cotton skirt. Elliot’s felt Indiana Jones hat, brim stained with dirt and sweat. Monica didn’t even like to touch it.

She reached for her dress. It was in its dry-cleaning plastic, hadn’t been worn in years, not since Monica had left Cordelia with her mother and gone with her first husband to one of his parents’ gallery openings in Los Angeles. Black, elegant, heavy with beadwork. Silk embroidery ringed the hem and climbed the length of the dress to the deep neckline. She remembered her mother-in-law handing her the box, the shock of being given a gift so absolutely perfect, as though the woman had been a fairy godmother, able to gauge her aspirations along with her size. And the attention: that night, the gallery lights glinting off the beads, Monica had felt as though she were as essential to this evening as the artist, and it seemed the dress itself had had the power to transform her.

“Do you like it?” Monica held it against her body, rocked her hips so the skirt swung.

Cordelia shrugged.

Monica was surprised at her disappointment. She’d imagined Cordelia reaching out to touch the hem with a single reverent finger.

“Your dad’s parents bought this for me when you were a baby.”

Cordelia’s face was shuttered, as it always was when her father was mentioned, as if, knowing how little interest he had in her, she’d decided to show none in him. “It’s ugly,” she said finally.

“Oh, come on. It’s not ugly. It cost over three hundred dollars.”

The dress was the most expensive item Monica owned — except for her car, which had been her father’s before he died. God knows why she’d brought the dress when the rest of her belongings went to her mother’s basement. Did Monica think there would be any place within three hundred miles where a dress like this would be appropriate? Did she think Elliot was that kind of man?

“Want to try it on?” She slipped it off the hanger. “We can pin the straps.”

“No,” said Cordelia, her cheek pressed into her forearm. “You put it on.”

Monica slid out of her down vest, peeled off the two sweaters and her jeans and her long underwear. She unhooked the heavy white nursing bra and slid the thick straps off her shoulders, pulled off her wool socks. She stood naked before the narrow mirror that hung on the closet door. The skin at her belly was still loose and puckered from Beatrice, her legs purplish and hairy. Her swollen breasts hung heavy, and despite the temperature, her nipples barely tightened.

“Well?” said Cordelia. “What are you waiting for?”

“Yes, yes.” Monica slipped the dress over her head. The silk was so cold against her skin that she gasped, laughing, and her goosebumps rippled through the light fabric. “Last time I wore this it was ninety degrees in L.A.!” Monica’s smile faded as she caught her reflection — the ridges of belly and hip under the fabric, her face, broad and splotchy hovering above — and she couldn’t help feeling as though she’d done some violence to the dress by letting herself get like this.

“What did I wear that day?”

“It was just me and your dad.”

Cordelia rolled away. “You look ugly.”

Hurt flashed through Monica, then fury. This child, seven years old, wanted to wound her and knew exactly how. In a minute Cordelia was paging sulkily through a book.

Monica was beautiful — men were always telling her so — and at one time it had seemed only right that she should wear clothes like this. After all, Monica had at seventeen been proposed to in the waiting room of her dentist’s office by a wealthy Frenchman who was visiting Santa Fe. “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever saw,” he told her, and Monica had believed him. He’d waited for her to have her teeth cleaned, and she’d allowed him to take her to dinner at a restaurant on Canyon Road, a restaurant so expensive there were no prices on the menu. Her whole life in Santa Fe, and she’d never even known this restaurant existed. “This is French,” he explained, and ordered escargot and old wine, pâté de lapin and roast duck avec sauce Roquefort, gratinée de Coquille St. Jacques. He insisted she try it all, kept passing his full fork across the table to her. “Beautiful women should eat beautiful food,” he said, and she’d agreed. At the end of the night he drove her back to her mother’s house and seemed resigned when she told him she couldn’t marry him because she had to finish high school. She’d thought then that’s what her future was: opportunity after opportunity unspooling around her.

Monica had therefore been ready two years later when she began dating the man who would be her first husband, ready to exchange college and literature for proximity to wealth, ready to stand smiling with a glass of wine in his parents’ galleries and to be kissed by old men who were influential in the art world. How embarrassed she’d been by her mother, with her faulty grammar and fake Anglicized name, her eagerness around his family, her transparent admiration of their money.

But Peter had liked her mother’s accent, had liked explaining things to Monica. “My little conquistador,” he called her. “My little Mexican.” Peter felt he’d discovered Monica, plucked her out of a provincial existence, just as he’d begun to discover and show outsider artists: an autistic man who built intricate scale models of his neighborhood out of toothpicks and plaster, an elderly woman who made elaborate cut-paper crowd scenes with an X-ACTO knife, a soybean farmer who painted large canvases of sloppy, expressive horses. Always seeking in people overlooked value that he could commodify.

Monica hadn’t, however, anticipated the pleasure he got in humiliating her — laughing at her in public for working her way through the classics or for not knowing framed Monet prints were tacky or for pretending to taste the difference in wine. Once, passing her as she read War and Peace, Peter yanked the book from her hands and snapped it shut. “You think reading Tolstoy means you’re smart. But it just means you’re literate.” She hadn’t been prepared for her own screaming rage, or an existence, which, even in the house his parents bought them with real art on the walls, still seemed cramped and insignificant. And above all she hadn’t been prepared for pregnancy: Cordelia, a curled exacting weight in her womb, anchoring her in the life she’d chosen.

Monica looked up at the back of her daughter’s dark, disapproving head on the crumpled pillow.

Well, hadn’t Monica done her best to undo all that? It hadn’t been easy to leave Peter, and it certainly hadn’t been easy dating with a child. Regardless of how pretty you might be, add a kid to the mix and your value plunged. Surely she deserved some credit. She was lucky: Elliot Rios was brilliant, attractive, a good person. And most important, he was good to Cordelia. He’d bought her a globe for her birthday, let her wear his hand lens around her neck so she could inspect rocks and dirt. He’d made her a geology kit in a canvas sample bag with her name on the label. It contained sample bags, a Sharpie, a bottle of weak acid to test for calcite, and a roll of pH paper. Before she or anyone else drank anything, Cordelia determined its pH: Folgers coffee, milk, apple juice. “Really yellow,” she’d announce before quaffing her juice with gusto. “Pure acid.” Cordelia might take Elliot’s kindness to her for granted, but Monica didn’t have that luxury.

They’d had idyllic evenings together, evenings Monica could never have imagined when she was seventeen: the four of them clustered around the hissing Coleman lantern with its glowing green mantle, Beatrice nursing, Cordelia absorbed in her workbooks, filling in boxes and pasting stickers. Elliot would tell Monica about the things he’d found in the desert: a concrete Jesus in a gulch fifty miles from the nearest settlement, a fossilized camel jaw, pieces of a crashed World War II fighter plane. And she would tell him about the old man at the Lucky Token who’d called her a sight for sore eyes, or how Cordelia had made a name for herself at school for knowing to use a hyphen when she could not fit the word into the end of the line.

Certainly these were pleasures her mother would never understand with her cheap ideas about success and her determined pursuit of gaiety. Monica’s mother: hell-bent on having the things that were unimaginable in the ranching town where she’d grown up, liquor cabinets and televisions and shag carpeting. Monica couldn’t leave that desperation behind fast enough.

Tonight, Monica decided, they’d all sleep in the foldout bed together, the whole family, warm and close. She longed for Elliot so deeply her throat ached.

“When you grow out of it, can I have your dress?” Cordelia’s voice was gruff, her head still turned away.

“Sure,” said Monica, feeling as though she’d won an argument. “But I don’t intend to grow out of it.”

AT FIRST MONICA THOUGHT the knocking was the wind, and then with a surge of fear, the NASA engineer, come to get her. She felt naked in the dress and pulled on her vest.

“Who could it be?” she asked Cordelia theatrically, heart pounding. She glanced at the knife drawer.

On the step stood a little girl. She was wearing a purple coat fringed with dingy fake fur on the hood; the hood was down and the coat unzipped, and in her hand she carried a smudged pink backpack. This was Amanda, from across the way, and Monica smiled with relief, remembering the pale watching face and her own absurd fear.

Monica knew Amanda from the schoolbus stop, where (while Cordelia fussed over Beatrice, sneaking looks at the older kids) Amanda’s big brother whipped at the ground — and Amanda — with a dangerous length of rope. She lived crammed in with her enormous relatives: parents, grandmother, uncle, brother. Amanda alone was thin, skinny, really. She reminded Monica of the baby orangutan at the Albuquerque zoo, startled-looking and wiry, bounding over her parents, who sat slumped and shapeless on the bare concrete floor.

“Amanda. Hi. What can I do for you?”

Amanda looked past Monica, as if waiting for the person she really wanted. Or maybe she was simply curious about how they lived. Wouldn’t Monica like a peek into Amanda’s trailer? — provided, of course, she wouldn’t have to interact with anyone. But to walk around, inspect their things, judge — of course she’d like that.

Monica stepped aside to let the girl in from the wind, and, when Amanda entered without hesitation, reminded herself to warn Cordelia never to set foot in anyone’s home alone, ever.

Amanda surveyed the trailer: the Riverside Shakespeare, Beatrice’s wipes and diapers on the table, Beatrice herself, who’d wakened and stopped mawing her fist to greet Amanda with a pleasured gurgle.

Amanda looked Monica over. “Why are you wearing that?”

“It’s my mom’s best dress,” Cordelia said, clambering down from the loft. “It cost over three hundred dollars.”

Amanda frowned. “What’s she doing here?” she asked Monica.

“I missed the bus,” said Cordelia. She had brightened at the arrival of the older girl. “And Elliot took our car. Are you here to play?”

Amanda didn’t answer, just looked with discontent at her backpack.

“Is everything okay, Amanda?” Monica asked. “Why aren’t you in school?”

Amanda straightened her shirt carefully under her coat, shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Why isn’t she in school?”

Though Amanda was only nine, there was something teenagerish about her, something disturbing and sexual. She wore her sleek dark hair parted on the side, and it slipped off her shoulders and down her back. The white tips of her rather large ears poked though the silky curtain. In October, when it was still hot during the day, Monica had seen her in a bikini, spreading a towel on the hard-packed dirt to sunbathe. Another day, Amanda tucked the hem of her shirt into the neck and pulled it down so that it resembled a bra. Monica had watched over the edge of her book as the girl walked the length of the park, sashaying past the adults. Who knew what went on in that trailer?

Now Amanda bit her lip, looked around critically, then set her backpack on the bench seat and scooted in. She folded her hands on the table.

“Are you sick, honey? If you’re sick, you should probably be home in bed.”

When Amanda didn’t answer, Monica abandoned the role of concerned, motherly neighbor. She sat at the table opposite her, pulled Beatrice to her lap, and waited. Cordelia sat beside Monica and folded her own hands, mirroring the older girl.

Amanda frowned at the baby. “She’s got boogers all over her face,” she said, then seemed to lose interest. “Where’s all your stuff? Don’t you even got a TV?”

“No,” said Monica, the same hint of pride in her voice she always had when asked this. “We don’t watch TV.” Stupid, showing off to a nine-year-old.

“You don’t got heat either?”

“Well,” Monica laughed. “Usually we have heat.”

“It’s broken.” Cordelia shot an accusing glance at Monica. “And anyway,” she told Amanda, placing a protective hand on Beatrice’s forearm, “that’s not boogers. She’s just chapped.”

Amanda pointed to the cardboard box that held Elliot’s soil samples, each tied and carefully labeled. “What’s that stuff?”

“My husband’s samples. He’s a geologist, which means he studies rocks. Geo means rock in Greek.”

To that teachable moment, Amanda made no reply.

Several times over the months, they’d heard Amanda’s mother yelling at her children from across the lot. “You get back here this minute or I don’t want to see your face ’til you’re twenty-one!” She’d shout breathlessly, bracing herself with a hand in the doorway, as if even standing were an enormous effort, and Monica and Elliot would laugh. Elliot did a strangely accurate impression of Amanda’s mother, but made her seem both crazier and shriller than she was.

Funny, only now did Monica feel ashamed, mocking the woman’s impotence, mocking the despair and futility that would lead to such a pointless threat.

“Can I get you anything?” She would have liked to offer the girl cookies and milk, but they’d just used the last of the milk and never had cookies.

Amanda scratched the back of her hand with a dirty nail, leaving dry tracks in the skin. “I thought maybe you’d want to buy something from me,” she said finally.

“Buy something?”

“Is it expensive?” asked Cordelia.

Beatrice patted Monica’s chest, ready to nurse.

Amanda indicated her backpack, distracted by the sight of Monica’s breast as Monica maneuvered it out from the neck of the dress and into Beatrice’s waiting mouth.

“What are you selling? Cookies? Magazines?” Amanda was still looking at her, and Monica suddenly felt very aware of the sensation of Beatrice’s mouth pulling on her nipple. “So,” she said. “Let’s see what you have.”

Amanda pulled her gaze away and unzipped her backpack. She arranged her wares on the table: a porcelain figurine of a milkmaid with a pail in her one remaining hand, a slack-needled odometer with loose wires, a worn pornographic magazine without a cover, a quarter-full bottle of shampoo. She turned the odometer slightly, to better display its virtues. “A dollar each. Except this”—she indicated the magazine—“is three dollars.”

“Let me see that,” said Cordelia, reaching for the magazine with its confusing fleshy close-ups.

Monica pushed it away. “It’s inappropriate,” she said, and Cordelia slumped, glowering.

Beatrice released Monica’s nipple with a pop and strained toward the objects.

“Amanda, where did you get these things? Do they belong to you?”

Amanda scowled. “Yes,” she said defensively, then added, “Duh.”

Monica pictured the scenario: Amanda picking them from the park’s dumpster, or, more likely, selecting them from the objects in her own home, turning them in her hands, evaluating them, stepping around calves and overstuffed shoes, while her family sat oblivious, watching television. “Why are you selling them?”

“Why are you here?” Amanda countered. “At Shady Lanes.”

“For my husband’s work.” Monica gestured again at the box of samples. The real question, Monica thought, was what Amanda needed the money for. Candy? Cigarettes? Maybe she was saving up for her escape. Maybe she simply wanted to have the money, to know she could make choices.

“Elliot’s getting his Ph.D.,” said Cordelia self-importantly. “In Santa Fe I lived one block from a swimming pool. We’re going back there.” She turned to Monica. “Aren’t we going back there?”

“I’m not sure where we’ll end up,” said Monica.

“Elliot got in a fight with his advisor,” Cordelia told Amanda, shaking her head with regret.

“Where did you hear that?” asked Monica. “It wasn’t a real fight.”

“It was,” said Cordelia. “That’s why it’s taking so long for him to get his Ph.D.”

For the first time Amanda looked mildly interested. “Did he punch him?”

“No,” Cordelia said with scorn.

“It’s not true, Cordelia,” Monica said.

“It is true,” Cordelia insisted. “You said. I heard you.”

Monica was having trouble breathing. It wasn’t Elliot’s fault he’d had to switch topics and start all over, just because of some unfounded insinuations. No one ever said the words falsified data, but Elliot had insisted on starting all over, insisted it was the only way to clear his name. He’d made the decision on his own, swiftly, had refused to consider rethinking it. And now, a year later, his funding had run out, and he seemed further and further from completion. What if he never finished?

What if they stayed out here — or if not here, in some equally godforsaken place — and this was her whole life? What if there was no tenure-track job on the horizon? No trim green quad, no book-lined living room? Monica thought of their bank balance, dangerously low, no infusions in sight, thought about how there was nothing left to cut from their budget, how she didn’t even know anymore if Elliot was brilliant. For all his flaws, Peter would never have found himself in Elliot’s position, chipping away stubbornly at some theory without guarantee of success. Peter was too savvy and self-interested. Monica glimpsed a future as barren as the salt flats, and as she did, the enormity of her disloyalty to Elliot made her catch her breath.

“Well? Are you going to buy something or not?” Amanda asked. Her hand was on the milkmaid.

“I’m sorry, no,” Monica said. Amanda was already packing the objects into her backpack.

What choice had Monica had, really? A lifetime of impossible hours at menial jobs, single-motherhood, her looks straining and distorting — that was no choice, not for her.

“Can you zip me?” Amanda waited, gazing over Monica’s head while Monica fumbled with her coat, then she swung her backpack over her shoulder. Her lips were blue. Monica shivered.

Monica held the door open for the girl, and the wind yanked it back and forth in her hands. “Goodbye, Amanda.” If Monica’s voice was taut, the child didn’t seem to notice. She jumped down the steps and into the wind. A dust devil whirled across the lot.

When Monica turned from the door, Cordelia had Beatrice on her lap, her skinny arms tight around the fat, smiling baby. She glared at Monica. Her brows were straight and thick, her father’s brows. “You lied. I don’t care what you do, but you shouldn’t lie in front of a baby.” Under those brows, Cordelia’s eyes blazed.

“You don’t know the first thing about it, Cordelia.” Monica turned her back on her daughter, the blood hot in her face. From the window she watched as Amanda trudged across the dirt to the bathrooms. The child’s shoulders were straight; she didn’t seem defeated.

In a rush Monica pushed open the door, stuck her head into the wind. “Wait!” Amanda stopped, then after the briefest pause, turned. “Wait a minute. You may be able to do something with this.” Monica was already sliding the straps off her shoulder.

“No!” cried Cordelia. “What are you doing?”

It was the right gesture, Monica saw now, to slough off everything that had come before, to give herself entirely to this life with Elliot. Monica imagined the dress tossed and wrinkled among Cordelia’s clothes, the straps knotted, the hem dragging on the floor, beads cascading every time it was touched. She imagined her daughter wearing the dress, reminding her. No, Monica couldn’t have borne it.

“How much is it?” Amanda eyed her from the doorway. “I have to save my money.”

Arm across her breasts, Monica hunched to cover herself and stepped out of the dress. She pulled on her sweater and jeans, hurrying, suddenly afraid Amanda might leave without it. “It’s a gift.”

“You can’t give it to her!” Cordelia cried. “You said it could be mine!”

Monica folded the dress into a square, the cold silk slipping against itself, handed it to Amanda.

Amanda shoved it into her backpack.

Cordelia’s eyes filled with angry tears. “I don’t really think it’s ugly.”

“We’ll talk about this later, Cordelia.”

This time Monica did not watch to see where Amanda went; she shut the door on the child with a profound sense of relief. Monica pulled Beatrice from Cordelia’s arms — too hard — and bounced the baby on her hip, covered the warm scalp with kisses. She did not look at Cordelia.

Monica knew what she’d tell her daughter later: that Amanda didn’t have nice things, that it was important to be kind to people who didn’t have the same opportunities. And when Cordelia made a fuss, as she was sure to, then Monica would remind her sharply that the dress was hers, Monica’s, to do with as she liked.

ELLIOT ARRIVED HOME that night after they’d all fallen asleep.

“Jesus,” he said and rezipped his coat. “It’s colder in here than outside.”

Monica swung herself into his arms. The night air clung to him, and she shivered.

“You’ve been sitting in here like this? God, you’re tough.”

Monica smiled, pleased, as he kissed her hair. “How was it?” She took Elliot’s jacket zipper in her fingers, pulled it down again and folded herself against his chest, breathing the cold, sour smell of wool and his week-old sweat, the dry scent of blowing dirt and sagebrush. “We missed you,” she said happily into his sweater. “We missed you so much.”

For nearly an hour, they stood outside — Monica stood, Elliot crouched — by the heating panel. Monica, lips and nose numb, held the flashlight while Elliot fiddled with the heater with gloved fingers.

“Did you find what you needed?”

One by one the stubborn screws loosened under Elliot’s screwdriver. “I checked out a bunch of deposits that looked promising. Lots of gravel, lots of sediment, but in the end, nothing datable.”

The relief she’d felt at his arrival drained, and now all the uneasiness of the day was upon her again. “You didn’t find anything you could use?”

“Monica, honey, it’s very complicated.” He paused in his work, looked at her over his shoulder. “You have to find the right cross-cutting relationships, the right exposure. If it were easy, we’d already have this figured out.” He spoke with forbearance, but she could see the irritation in his face. Hadn’t he just wanted to come home to his snug family? And now here he was in the cold while his wife judged, harassed, blamed.

Elliot turned back to the heating panel. “Shine it here.” The wind had died down, and the desert was oddly quiet. Out on the dark highway, the sign was motionless on its post.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She concentrated on holding the light steady. “It’s just been an awful day.”

At bedtime, Cordelia had asked, “Can I sleep with you and Beatrice tonight?”

“No,” Monica had said. “You have your own bed. And Elliot will be home.” She’d patted the mattress in the loft, and Cordelia, clumsy in her layers of sweaters and sweatpants, hauled herself up the ladder.

Monica kissed her daughter goodnight over the edge of the loft, descended, then stepped back up the ladder and placed her hand on Cordelia’s back. “Listen. Tomorrow will be better, sweet pea.”

Cordelia burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag, teeth chattering. “Okay,” she said, then fell asleep with her usual ease.

Now Monica said, “I did something stupid today.” She told Elliot about Amanda’s visit. “And then after her sales pitch, I gave her my dress.” Elliot’s hands cast outsized shadows against the side of the trailer. He frowned into the panel. “My best dress. Out of the blue. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Elliot held the screwdriver in his teeth and peered. “Hold on.” He seemed to be counting wires. Elliot pinched a wire in his fingers and looked up at her, his face lit by the edge of the flashlight beam. “Your judgment was impaired, maybe. Onset of hypothermia. I’m amazed you didn’t start a fire in the sink.”

“I shouldn’t have given it away. Or I should have given it to Cordelia. If anything, it belongs to Cordelia.”

Elliot shrugged. “You felt bad for the kid. It’s a just dress. You don’t even wear dresses.”

Once, when they were hiking, Monica had picked up a beautiful rock, worn smooth by some ancient creek and intricately marked, as if with a fine-nibbed pen. She’d handed it to Elliot, expecting him, the geologist, to see what made it beautiful. “Hm,” he’d said, glancing at it absently. “Limestone.” And with that both she and the rock were dismissed, while he returned to his thoughts about contact formations and pre-Cambrian flood plains. Monica’s feelings had been hurt, but she hadn’t shown it. His thoughts were simply on a grander scale than hers, concerned not just with the minutia of a single life, or even of their species; he was concerned with the life of the planet itself.

Elliot was right. What, really, had Monica given away? An old dress. A relic of difficult times. So why, then, was she angry?

“I should have given it to Cordelia,” Monica insisted, and she felt her voice rise. If she wasn’t careful, she might cry.

“She won’t remember,” said Elliot. “Kids don’t.”

Maybe Cordelia wouldn’t remember. It was possible. But despite being a child, Cordelia knew more about Monica’s first marriage than anyone else, knew how bad it had gotten and how long Monica had stayed. Cordelia never talked about those days or about what she’d seen, never discussed what it was like to hear her mother yelling and sobbing and smashing plates; a mother could almost fool herself into believing a child could forget these things.

It occurred to Monica that now Cordelia herself was the only thing left from that old life. When she’d taken off the dress today, Monica hadn’t even felt cold, so filled was she with the dark exhilaration of punishing Cordelia. In giving away Cordelia’s lovely, meaningless inheritance, she’d made an adversary of her seven-year-old daughter, and now even that she held against her.

The park was dark, the trailers asleep, except for Amanda’s, where the blue light of a TV glowed, shifting and desolate.

“I should go over there. I should go explain to Amanda’s mother that I made a mistake. Right now. Before they go to bed.”

“Monica.” Elliot laughed. “You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can.” Of course she could. She’d knock at the door, wait while Amanda’s mother pulled herself to her feet, switched on a lamp, and made her way across the carpet. Monica would step into the warm trailer, introduce herself, explain, and Amanda’s mother would fetch the dress. The interaction would be awkward, perhaps, but nothing Monica couldn’t smooth over, and it wouldn’t matter because Monica had the chance to make things right. “I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Monica would say. “Amanda’s always welcome at our place. And you, too. We should have coffee.”

“I’m going.” She pushed the flashlight at Elliot, but he wouldn’t take it. The beam danced across the dirt. “Here,” she said.

“Come on, Monica. Think about it. You’re going to go over there and snatch back something you gave to a little kid? That mother of hers is going to drop dead of a coronary any minute, and you’re going to go fight with her about an old dress in the middle of the night?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to Amanda,” Monica said, and as she said it she knew she wouldn’t go. “It doesn’t even fit her.”

“It doesn’t fit Cordelia, honey.” He put a hand on her leg, patted her briefly. “You’re not thinking.”

“What do you know?” Monica said with bitterness she hadn’t realized she felt. “You don’t even know Cordelia. You’re not her father. You’ve just met her.”

Elliot’s hands stilled on the wire. He turned, face wide open and hurt. “That’s not fair, Monica. I care about her very much.”

He wouldn’t be able to see her beyond the flashlight’s beam. Monica bit her lip, glad for the dark.

“That’s not fair,” he repeated.

Elliot returned his attention to the heater, and they stood in silence. Out on the highway a car passed. After a time he clipped a wire.

“Fixed.” He dangled a twisted length of wire in his gloved fingers. His voice was stiff. “The lead to the thermostat had corroded. The heat should kick in now.”

They’d make it up, she and Elliot, find each other under the covers as the chill ebbed around them. Outside, the wind would pick up again, and in Amanda’s trailer the television would flicker all night. In the morning, Cordelia would awaken early. She would look down from the loft at her family: her mother, her stepfather, and between them, arms flung wide, her little sister. Cordelia would forever feel on the outside, Monica saw, and Monica herself had put her there, because a person couldn’t live with that kind of reproach. It would only get harder between them, Monica saw that, too; Cordelia’s judgments would become more pointed, Monica would rankle ever more under her sharp eye. But Cordelia wouldn’t know any of this, not yet. Tomorrow, while her family slept below her in the gray dawn light, she would place her cheek back on the pillow and watch them, waiting for them to stir, and she wouldn’t even notice that she was finally warm.