A load of towels in the washing machine has turned sour, and the kitchen table is covered with scissors, crayons, and scraps of construction paper, the remnants of Aimee’s final school project, a diorama about the siege at Goliad. I clean it up while the coffee brews and I am just sitting down at the table when I remember the bucket that’s catching a slow drip under the bathroom sink. After I drag it out and dump it in the bathtub, I pause for a second. When was the last time I took a bath or put my makeup on in the morning? I am letting myself go, as my mother would say, but for whom would I keep myself up? Aimee and the baby don’t care, and Robert is still so mad I answered the front door and let that girl into our home, he can hardly see straight. He blames her for our troubles.

In the church where I grew up, we were taught that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind. The church wasn’t big on mercy, either. When I tried to explain myself to Robert in the days after the crime, when I told him I had sinned against this child, betrayed her in my heart, he said my only sin was opening the door in the first place, not thinking of my own damned kids first. The real sin, he said, was some people letting their daughters run the streets all night long. Since then, I can hardly stand to look at him.

The sheriff’s deputy had taken Strickland without a fight. When Aimee called the sheriff, she gave the dispatcher an earful about the girl sitting across from her at the kitchen table and the man she could see through the window. Where is the man now? the dispatcher asked, and when Aimee said out front with my mama, they put a rush on it. The sheriff’s deputy walked up to the young man and jammed the barrel of his revolver into his sternum. Son, he said, I don’t know if you’re stupid or crazy, but wipe that goddamn grin off your face. You are in some serious shit.

The deputy was right. The new district attorney, Keith Taylor, charged him with aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder. Mr. Taylor’s secretary, Amelia, calls me every few days to tell me about a new delay in the trial or ask me questions about Gloria. Did I know her before? What did she say to me? Did I feel threatened by Dale Strickland?

You go into that house and get her, he told me. Do it right now. Don’t wake up your husband who is sleeping upstairs, who is not sleeping upstairs, who is not even at home, you go in there, Mary Rose, you take that child by the arm and stand her on her own two feet and bring her to me.

And I was going to do it.

When morning comes, I walk around the house and turn all the lights off. Robert will pitch a fit when he sees the electric bill. We can’t afford to rent a house in town, he will say, especially not this year. We already have a house. Yes, but out there, I say, and you wanted us to move into town before all this happened, and then Robert will remind me that I used to love that old place, and that now he can’t afford to be away from his cows. When he left a hired man in charge for the three days it took me to have our son and heal up enough to come home, the man took off for a job in the oil patch. Screwworms infested the animals’ open sores, their ears, even their genitals. Robert lost fifty head of cattle. Shot this year’s profit margin to hell, he says bitterly every time it comes up, which is every Sunday when he comes into town with a bag of candy for Aimee and flowers for me.

Thank you, I say. After I’ve put them in some water, we stand across the room from each other—him thinking I ruined our family, me thinking he would have preferred me to leave that child alone on the front porch while Aimee and me stood on the other side of a locked door.

Sundays, Robert looks at the baby like he’s just bought a prize bull at auction. He holds my son on his lap for a few minutes, marveling at the baby’s big hands—a quarterback’s hands, he says—and then gives him back to me. In a few years, when he’s big enough to catch a football or throw a bale of hay from the back of a truck or shoot snakes out at the ranch, the boy will be more interesting to him. Until then, he’s all mine.

After the kids are asleep, I give Robert a couple of casseroles for his week’s meals and he either leaves directly, or we have a fight and then he leaves. It’s a relief to hear his truck door slam and the engine turn over.

I am bound and determined to keep my kids safe here in town, but I miss the sky and the quiet. Almost from the minute we moved into town, I started thinking about moving out. Not back to the ranch, but someplace as quiet as the ranch used to be, before screwworms and oil-field companies, before Dale Strickland drove up to my front door and turned me into a coward and a liar.

In my twenty-six years of living, I only have been out of Texas twice. The first time, Robert and I drove up to Ruidoso for our honeymoon. It feels like three lifetimes ago—I was seventeen years old and three months pregnant with Aimee—but I can still close my eyes and call to mind the Sierra Blanca peak standing guard over that little town. I can still breathe in long and slow and remember the pine trees, how their sharp, stinging odor grew stronger when I folded a handful of needles in half and squeezed them in my hand.

We returned home three days later after a stop to see Fort Stanton, and for the first time in my life I noticed the way the air smelled in Odessa, something between a gas station and a trash can full of rotting eggs. You never smell it when you grow up here, I guess.

The only other time I smelled those trees was two years ago, when I told Robert that Aimee and I were driving up to Carlsbad for three days to visit an elderly second cousin he didn’t even know I had. We left town to the news on the radio that nine people in Denver City had died from a hydrogen sulfide leak.

What’s hydrogen sulfide, Aimee wanted to know, and I told her I had no idea. Who’s the Skid Row Slasher? she asked. What’s the IRA? I changed the channel to the college radio station, and we listened to Joe Ely and the Flatlanders. When we reached Carlsbad, I kept driving.

Aimee—I looked in the rearview mirror at a pickup truck that had been tailgating us for the last five miles and eased my foot off the accelerator—how about you and me go to Albuquerque?

Aimee looked up from her Etch A Sketch and frowned. How come?

I don’t know, see someplace new? I hear there’s a brand-new Holiday Inn downtown that’s got an indoor pool and a pinball arcade. Maybe we’ll drive up to the mountains and see the Ponderosa pines.

Can I have a souvenir?

No souvenirs this time, just memories. The words stuck in my throat and I eased toward the shoulder to give the truck as much room as possible. When the son of a bitch finally passed, he pulled up right next to me and laid on the horn and I nearly pissed myself. Eight years earlier, I would have given him the finger. Now, with my child sitting in the front seat next to me, I gritted my teeth and smiled.

People who live in Odessa like to tell strangers that we live two hundred miles from anywhere, but Amarillo and Dallas are at least three hundred miles away, El Paso is in a different time zone, and Houston and Austin might as well be on a different planet. Anywhere is Lubbock, and on a good day, it is a two-hour drive. If the sand is blowing or there’s a grass fire or you stop for lunch at the Dairy Queen in Seminole, it could take you all afternoon. And the distance from Odessa to Albuquerque? Four hundred and thirty seven miles, a little more than seven hours if you don’t get caught in the speed trap outside Roswell.

We had just enough time for a cheeseburger and a quick swim in the pool before bed. While Aimee was in the bathtub, I called Robert to let him know we were safe and sound in Carlsbad and my old cousin was still full of piss and vinegar. He grunted and said something about the difficulties of reheating the King Ranch casserole I had left thawing on the kitchen counter. Cover it with aluminum foil, I said, and put it in the oven. After we hung up, I sat on the bed and looked at the receiver. I was ten weeks pregnant and just the thought of another baby made me want to hang myself in the barn. Robert wanted a son, maybe even two of them, but Aimee was enough for me. I’d been thinking about trying to get my GED, maybe take some classes at Odessa College.