We send her home early so we don’t have to split the tips, but before she goes Evelyn gives her a pep talk. Karla, darlin’, an oil boom can mean earning a month’s rent on a single Friday night. It can mean a down payment on a car and a little scratch in the bank. We can post bail, help one of our kids dry out, pay for a semester at the junior college, all on one week’s tips. So when a customer tells us to smile, you can bet your right tit we do it. Our lips curl upward like somebody just pulled a string. Our teeth are paper white, our dimples parentheses.

After closing time, when the tables have been scrubbed down and the floors are swept and we’ve rolled enough silverware to feed the U.S. Army, we have our shift drink and then walk to our cars in twos and threes. We wait for long enough to make sure nobody has a flat tire or dead battery. We come prepared, with jumper cables and Fix-a-Flat in our trunks. We carry pistols and Mace in our purses. Evelyn, who is left-handed, keeps one little snubbie in her purse and one in the glove box of her Ford Mustang. Behind the bar, she keeps an antique electric cattle prod, for the usual trouble, and a Wingmaster, for when things get out of hand.

Two o’clock in the morning and still nearly ninety degrees out. The recent rains settled the dust, and now the clouds are moonlit and pale and empty as old churches. There’s the usual light traffic on the drag, but if Evelyn is right about the Bone Springs shale, or the Ozona platform, it will be bumper-to-bumper in a few months, with license plates from all over the country and hungry men with cash in their pockets. Something to look forward to.

*

Monday through Friday, Karla’s mother works the line at a bearing supply company, but she’s happy to watch the baby at night. New hires work the lunch rush for the first month, Evelyn tells her, so Karla hires a sitter for Diane and takes four shifts a week. In the storeroom where we sit at a folding card table and eat our shift meals, she tapes an index card to the wall with her phone number—I will pick up any nights or weekends. Thanks, Karla Sibley. Someone draws a line through her last name and writes, Darlin’! And below that, Smile! Because it doesn’t seem to come naturally to her.

While Karla waits for somebody to call in sick, she drinks her weight in coffee and counts her tips and tries to remember to smile. She reminds herself that she lost her last job, a sweet bartending gig at the Country Club, because she couldn’t get along with the regulars. Corrine Shepard doesn’t count, management told her. Our male patrons think you don’t like them. So Karla rolls extra silverware at the end of each shift and rubs the ice machine until she can see, if not her own face clearly reflected in the stainless steel, then at least the indistinct shadows of her mud-brown curls and wide forehead, the dark smudges beneath her eyes from sweating through her black eyeliner and having a baby at home that still doesn’t sleep through the night.

The oil reps come in for lunch smelling like they came straight from the cologne counter at Dillard’s. They wear Polo shirts and khaki pants. If they drove in from Houston, they stopped in San Angelo and bought ostrich or alligator boots. If they came from Dallas, they stopped at Luskey’s or James Leddy’s. Everybody wears a Stetson, and everybody’s got a checkbook in his shirt pocket.

They carry cardboard tubes filled with topographical maps, and after lunch, they spread them out on the table. The new fields are here and here and here—they point to vast sections of grazing land, or land that used to be good for grazing—three billion barrels of oil and enough natural gas to set the whole world on fire twice. The infrastructure is already in place, they tell wildcatters and hard-up cattle ranchers, or it will be soon. The oil reps talk easements and cattle guards, wastewater ponds and extraction wells and spill contingencies. They talk about a newly discovered shale in the Delaware Basin, natural gas fields out near the Bowman Ranch. They buy and sell water and promise to close the gate behind them so the cows don’t get out on the highway. They nod their heads and promise to remind their men that a good bull is worth three months’ pay. When they close a deal, they take out their checkbooks and lift one finger in the air and Karla brings a round of shots.

She pays the sitter and helps her mother with the mortgage. She opens a savings account for Diane. On her day off, she drives out to see a 1965 Buick Skylark that was advertised in the American. The storage facility is just outside the city limits, six corrugated metal buildings across the field from the Full River Gospel of Life Church, a confusing name since the closest river is the Pecos and it generally looks like everybody in the county went down and took a shit in it at the same time. It was her mother’s car, the woman tells Karla, and it’s been in storage since the crash of ’72. It can be a little sluggish on the highway, she says, but it’s got eight cylinders and 5,000 original miles. For two hundred dollars cash, it’s Karla’s.

Karla climbs into the front seat, a palace of gold crushed velvet that still smells of the old lady’s tobacco and baby powder and wintergreen gum. The back seat looks big enough to pitch a tent in, and Karla is already imagining Diane bouncing around back there as they drive down the highway to their next life. The woman hands her a set of car keys—one for the ignition and driver’s side door, one for the glove box, one for the trunk. When Karla turns the ignition switch, the engine burbles and dies. She turns it a second time. The engine roars and rumbles and vibrates from her ass all the way down to her foot resting on the gas pedal. Oh, hell yes, she thinks. Would you take $150 for it? she asks the woman.

*

Why did God give oil to West Texas?

To make up for what He did to the land.

*

Nights are money, we tell Karla when she picks up her first dinner shift. After nine o’clock, it’s mostly men with wallets full of cash and hair still damp after stopping by the house for a hot shower. Karla, darlin’, we tell her, they can run the hot water until their skin peels off, and they will still smell like stale farts in a closed room.

We tell her which men don’t mean anything by it—a joke, an arm snaking around her waist, a marriage proposal—and which men do. Listen to their damn stories, we say about the first group. Laugh at their damn jokes. About the second group, we say never let them get you alone. Don’t tell them where you live. And watch out for that one—we point to Dale Strickland sitting at the end of the bar, getting drunk all by his lonesome—he’s a pervert with a thing for brunettes. Buckle up, gals, Evelyn says. It’s going to start getting busy any day now.

Karla tells us Diane’s daddy is in the navy and stationed in Germany, but we spend some time rolling silverware together and the lies fall away PDQ. It doesn’t matter who it was, she tells us, some boy from Midland.

What matters? Diane napped today and Karla got a hot shower before her shift. She shows us the Polaroid took that morning. Karla has russet-colored hair and eyes the color of sandstones. Constellations of freckles cover her nose, and her round cheeks mark her as still barely out of childhood. A black tank top shows off more freckles on her shoulders. The baby, dressed in head-to-toe pink, stares doe-eyed at the camera, her little cheek crushed against her mother’s. Four months old today, Karla tells us, her name means divine. She’s beautiful, we tell Karla, she looks just like you.

*

The women’s clinic in Santa Teresa is three hundred miles north, just across the border at Las Cruces, and back then Karla shared a car with her mom. She thought about taking it anyway, but even if she could get there, she would have to spend the night, and how would she explain this to her mother? And what if she were pulled over in one of those little towns between Odessa and El Paso? She had heard stories about those sheriffs, how they knew what girls were up to, when they spotted them driving down the interstate by themselves, how they made girls follow them back to the station and wait while their fathers were called. Game over.

At eight weeks, Karla drove over to the health-food store and bought tinctures of black cohosh and cotton root bark from a woman with frizzy hair and a muumuu so electric it ought to have come with a seizure warning. Put this in hot water and drink a lot of it, the woman said. Gallons. You ought to be peeing every ten minutes. If you run out, come back and get more.