Her uncle returns by seven o’clock every evening, carrying bags from Whataburger or KFC, and some small gift—a magazine, lip balm, a small hot plate and cans of soup so she can make lunch, peanut butter and a box of saltines, a Spanish workbook with hardly any of the words filled in that he found on the ground next to a pumpjack. Every night he brings something, and when he hands it to her, she can see that he has done his best to get the oil off his hands.

One evening, he comes home with a pair of sunglasses, a portable cassette deck, and three tapes—Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, and Lydia Mendoza. Drove all over West Odessa to find that last one, he says. This machine is portable. You can carry it anywhere, you don’t even have to find a plug. He shows her where to put the batteries, how to adjust the shoulder strap.

I don’t want it, Glory says. I don’t want to hear any music, and if I did, it wouldn’t be this crap.

Okay. Victor loads the items back into a grocery bag. I’ll set them on the dresser in case you change your mind. Let me take a shower and we’ll watch some TV. Soon, Victor tells his niece, Alma will be back and they will all sit down together and watch their programs. He has sent letters to their family in Puerto ángel with their new address. It’s only a matter of time before Alma writes back to let them know she is fine. Your mother will have a plan, he says. She will try to cross again in September, when the weather is cooler.

It is June, and the patches of hair that cover Glory’s head are scarcely thicker than pinfeathers. Her hair, like the rest of her, is starting over. Like Brandy Henderson, the soap opera character in The Edge of Night who goes into hiding and disappears from the story, Glory’s life is a long pause, a stopped tape. But she is getting ready to start moving again. Come August, all she has to do is testify, her uncle says. Just put on a nice dress and walk into that courtroom, and tell the truth. I’m not doing it, she tells him. I don’t care what happens to him.

*

It is ninety-eight degrees outside when the air conditioner switches off, ticks steadily for a few minutes, and goes silent. Within minutes, as if it has been waiting for its opportunity to strike, the heat begins to seep through the windowpane and climb in through the small cracks on the windowsill. It crawls through the narrow gap between the door and carpet, and slithers from the vent above the bed.

Glory usually waits it out in a bathtub filled with cold water, but today it is so hot the water comes out of the faucet warm, and her embarrassment about her scars and hair, her desire not to be seen, and her fear and sorrow that she has been stolen from herself, that she has been wounded, maybe fatally—all are in abeyance to something she has not felt since February. She is bored. Or at least that is what she will name it this morning. In a few years, she might call it loneliness. This afternoon, she digs around in a box until she finds the bathing suit Victor bought for her, a simple blue one-piece with sturdy straps. She pulls it on without looking at her stomach, or her feet and ankles, or the star-shaped scar in the center of her palm.

Grabbed onto a barbed-wire fence to stop yourself from falling? Victor said when she showed it to him in the hospital. Girl, that’s some army-level toughness. But I fell anyway, she said. Well, don’t tell that part of your story, he said. Tell people you squeezed that fence until the barbs bent flat in your hand.

My story? No. This is not my story.

She squeezes the doorknob of her motel room tight and grips the wrought-iron railing that runs along the second-story walkway. Heart pounding, one hand on the pocket of her shorts where she can feel the knife pressing against her groin, Glory tries to act as if she goes to the pool every day, as if she walks down these metal stairs several times a day, as if she is a normal girl.

She sits on a lawn chair at the far end of the pool, still wearing the Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jean shorts she pulled on over her bathing suit. Before she left the room, she wrapped a bottle of Coke in a white bath towel that rests on the deck next to her feet. She drinks it quickly. For weeks she has been peeking through the curtains, watching the woman she saw swimming on their first night at the Jeronimo Motel. Every day she comes down to the pool with her two kids, a chubby little boy who has his mother’s yellow hair and always wears the same navy-blue swim trunks, and a little girl, long and skinny as a rifle, her freckles and stringy red hair glowing in the sunlight.

Today, when they walk to the shallow side of the pool, the three of them pause and stare briefly at Glory, as if she is trespassing. The little girl lies down on a lounger and opens a thick book, and the boy jumps into the pool with his small collection of things that float—a faded plastic boat, a tennis ball, a blow-up raft that has been patched with several pieces of silver duct tape. The mother paddles up and down the pool a few times and then wraps a towel around her head and puts on her sunglasses before sitting down next to her daughter. Mother and daughter slather baby oil on their legs and arms. They lie back and wait for the sun to turn them pink, bright pink, then lobster red. They wear matching one-piece bathing suits covered with large red and yellow flowers, the girl’s a little too large for her skinny body, the mother’s a little too small.

They might be the homeliest people Glory has ever seen. The boy has a large gap where his two front baby teeth used to be, and the little girl picks at the skin peeling from her sunburned shoulders, covertly putting the pieces in her mouth while she reads. The mother’s arms and legs are round and hairless and pink, like something plucked from a shell.

Glory leans back and closes her eyes until the sun burns her eyelids and the knife grows hot against her skin. She tucks it into the folded white towel, but puts it back in her shorts after a few minutes. As the day grows hotter, she walks to the edge of the pool and lowers the towel into the water, then wrings it out and lays it across her legs, her arms and face.

The little boy paddles his float to the deep end of the pool and hovers next to the edge a few feet from where Glory sits. You got change for a dollar? he asks suddenly, as if he is hiding a bill somewhere in his swim trunks and might pull it out, wadded up and dripping wet, to trade for a handful of coins. Glory looks at him with her mouth open, as if the fact of him, or more particularly, of his voice, has left her stupefied.

Do you speak English? he drawls.

T. J.! You leave that girl alone. The woman jumps to her feet and hustles across the pool deck, large and quick as a parade float caught in a sharp wind. When the towel on her head comes loose and begins to slide down her back, she tosses it on the deck. She moves fast for a woman her size, closing the distance between herself and the little boy and Glory in just a few seconds.

T. J. grins at Glory and pushes his float away from the edge of the pool. Why don’t you get in the swimming pool? he says. Are ya afraid ya might get grease in the water? Afraid your back might get wet? He giggles then, shoving his fist against his mouth as if to stifle the sound. Wetback, he says. He looks like he weighs eighty pounds, and while she can’t really swim, Glory thinks she could probably drown him.

The mother gets down on her hands and knees, stretches her arm across the water, and grabs at his raft. God damn it, T. J., you little shit. You come out of that water right now. She drags the float to the pool’s edge and he is already yowling when his mother reaches down and grabs him by the arm. Standing now, she lifts her son into the air, his arms flailing, fat legs churning madly. Her strength is surprising, and wonderful.

Glory is already on her feet, reaching for her towel and eyeing the gate. She will have to walk past the woman and her son to get to it, or go the long way around the pool, past the little girl who has set down her book and sits laughing on her lounge chair.

Wait, the woman says to Glory. Can you just wait a minute? Red-faced and panting, the woman sets her son on his feet and towers over him. She wraps her fingers around the soft part of his arm and pinches so hard he yowls. You won’t be able to sit down for three days if I ever hear you talking like that again. She tightens her grip and the boy snuffles.

You hear me? She is still holding the soft flesh of his arm.

Yes, ma’am, he says.

Get your ass upstairs and take a nap. Tammy! Take T. J. up to the room—she glowers at her son—he’s tired. Glory thinks for a second the woman has said tarred, her accent is so thick. He’s tarred.

The little girl is on her feet now, holding her book in the air and yelling back at her mama. It’s hot in there and you promised to take me to the bookmobile.

We’ll see, maybe later. Beneath her T-shirt, the woman’s chest moves rapidly up and down. Y’all get to the room now.

They watch the little boy fuss and stomp across the parking lot, and then the woman holds out one hand. I’m sorry about that, he gets it from his daddy’s side of the family. Glory shoves her hands in her pockets. I don’t really care.