“You’re disgusting.” Bernard brought it down to a defeated whisper.
“What she’s going to remember is...” She stopped to see if she could find the point to what she was saying. “... is you shouting.”
They had both looked at the baby who sat calmly playing with Legos. Go figure, a sixty-year-old man, just lost his wife of thirty years, no children, meets a desperate desert rat at the 7-Eleven on Vista Chino. He gets her pregnant, which shocks her because, well, he’s decrepit. So now there’s Baby Carol.
He wanted to name her after his dead wife and Kimberly just shrugged. If she couldn’t name her miscarriage, or abortion, what did she care what people called her? He dressed her up for Mother’s Day, all in pink, even the little shoes. No matter. Baby Carol was only three. She’d never remember any of this. There were plenty of Mother’s Days to come. Next year would be better. Stick to wine, ditch the blow.
That had been May. By August she had been to Betty Ford’s twice. Insurance covered most of the cost, but she hated it there. While sneaking a smoke out by Lake Hope, the immaculate man-made lake that is the centerpiece of the “campus,” she had looked up to the mountains bordering the valley and imagined it was more peaceful up there. Rehabs like to believe they are peaceful places, but that’s just because they paint everything beige. It’s actually exhausting — in the morning they get you up before you’re ready to get up, make you eat with other people, and participate in what they call their “wellness activities.” The mountain, as high as she could go, was the answer. Fewer people and it would be a lot cooler out. She scaled the fence and in less than four minutes was in the back of an Uber (Toyota Camry, navy blue).
“Get me as far from this place as quickly as you can.”
The Uber driver asked if she was sure she wanted to go all the way up the mountain.
“Yes, wherever it’s cooler. I can’t breathe down here.”
He’d turned to look at her and at a glance had tagged her as trash.
“How about Anza?”
He drove her up the mountain in the dark, the car winding and twisting through the hairpin curves, her stomach not reacting to it well. She could only see as far as the headlights let her. About an hour later, he stopped at a Circle K.
“Here it is, beautiful downtown Anza.”
Before he left, she blew him in the backseat. When he’d come, she asked him for a twenty and he told her to fuck off and left her in the dust. She was going to write him a lousy review but caught a glimpse of herself in the convenience store window and changed her mind. I have to start eating, she thought, I’m all skin and bones. And my hair! But a Circle K’s better than a circle jerk.
Welcome to your new life.
Except for the fluorescent lights of the Circle K, Anza had been dead dark that first night. Some bum told her there were abandoned buildings all over Anza. At first light she started looking for a place to crash. She settled into an old toolshed at the ass end of Dusty Road — that’s what it was called and that’s also what it was. That’s what Anza was like: no frills.
No thrills either.
Until she started robbing them. What else could she do? As soon as the Uber charge showed up on the statement, Bernard canceled her credit cards. She called him. He wanted to know where she was. She refused to tell him, so he canceled her phone.
“The only way to get your privileges back is to return to Betty’s and do what’s best for this family,” Bernard said before he hung up.
She hated that he called it a family, not a favorite word of hers. And she hated most of all that he called the place Betty’s, as if the former first lady would be waiting behind the counter, like at a diner.
Hi, hon, what’ll you have?
An ounce of crank and a cup of Joe, Betty.
Now, Justin Alvarez was halfway down the mountain, halfway to the desert towns she knew better than she knew herself: Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and finally Indio. She had money but no credit card. No credit card, no Uber. The sunset turned the mountains orange. She wished it was dark so she could pretend she didn’t know where she was or where she was going or who that guy was beside her. Justin was holding onto the steering wheel hard.
“You okay?” she asked him.
He took forever to respond. “Yeah, twilight driving makes me sad.”
“It will be dark soon,” she said.
In the last light she’d seen the change in the terrain, from pine trees to mesquite to striped rocks to stretches of sand littered with what her mother called malicious plants — creosote, ocotillo, barrel cactus. Justin had to drive the last stretch of switchback curves in the dark, and as they twisted their descent, she could feel the heat rising up to greet her. You thought you could get away?
By the time Justin dropped her off outside Indio’s night market, she had four hundred and sixty dollars in her pocket. She’d asked for five hundred, but Justin needed some of it for gas.
He had convinced her to let him keep the loot and sell it on his own a lot farther away. “For your own good, Kim. Sell this shit near here, they’ll pop you before you start.”
He got off cheap. Hell, he could get five hundred just for the birth certificate down in Mexicali. He worked a blow job and tittie grope into the deal and she went along. The pool boy had been waiting all this time. Kimberly no longer looked as she had when he was cleaning her pool, but she was still Kimberly to him.
“You’re all the same,” she said before lowering herself on his rod. Soon as the transaction was over, she said she needed a beer.
“I don’t think so.” He didn’t sound like Justin anymore, he sounded like a total asshole.
“Get the hell out of here,” Kimberly growled, then hopped down from the truck and slammed the door.
It was August and Indio’s swap meet could only function at night when the temperature dropped from 117 degrees to a tolerable ninety-five. The night market was all too well lit, too nicely organized. The blacktop parking lot too clean. Was this Indio? You’d think it was Rancho Mirage or some other pretentious desert community. It irritated her to walk past dozens of vendors waiting for someone, anyone, to buy a trinket, some silver jewelry, purses, shoes, mattresses, blenders from 1995, Aztec suns made of pounded tin, and about a mile of Mexican food and drinks. Kimberly wanted beer but they had none, so she bought horchata in a cup with ice and it was the most delicious thing she’d ever had. She could have drunk down the whole dispenser.
As if drawn by invisible strings, she made her way to the back, beyond the light cast by the stalls, to where the blacktop ended and the sand and the weeds began. She smelled them before she saw them. They smelled just like the men who loitered around the Circle K in Anza. What was that smell? If she could bottle it, she could sell it as a pesticide. They were standing in a circle, talking in low voices. They were all colors; no one was exempt from the strings, the hooks. Take her for example, a white and, until recently, middle-class woman, until recently a pretty girl, naturally blonder than blond. Banana blond, some people called it.
“You’re wasting your life away serving tacos to tourists,” her mother had said. “You’re certainly pretty enough to be a stripper.”
She’d said so more than once, but stripping wasn’t for Kimberly. Too complicated. Too many routines. Too much competition from women who wanted to show off, who swung from those aluminum poles like glittering tether balls. These men, at the edge of the night market, were all shirtless and no one was tipping them for it. They looked up when she approached: the prey.