Karla drank until she was bent in half with cramps. The tea tasted like dirt and mold, and when she puked and shit, her mother sprayed Lysol in the bathroom and asked what the hell she’d been eating. She went to band practice and wrote a paper on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In gym class, she stood with her arms at her sides while dodge balls hit her square in the belly until Coach Wilkins yelled at her to get the hell out of the way. In the locker room, she stared at the shower floor. Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink. And not a drop of blood anywhere, she thought. In bathroom stalls all over school, she studied wads of toilet paper and the crotch of her panties. But the pregnancy stuck. It stuck, it stuck, it stuck. My uterus is a painted ship, Karla thought, and I am waiting for the trade winds. Ten weeks, fifteen—and then she was at twenty and it was too late to pretend anymore.

The woman at the health-food store introduces herself as Alison and asks Karla if she’s breastfeeding. When Karla explains that the labor and delivery nurses didn’t think it was a good idea, since she needed to get a job ASAP, Alison gives her several joints and tells her to stay away from booze and crystal. It is fall now and Alison’s muumuus are the color of wildfires and whiskey. Coffee and weed is the best possible combination of drugs for a single mother, she tells Karla. Don’t let yourself get busted. Never share. Never tell anyone, not even your boyfriend—especially not him. Don’t buy paraphernalia. Instead, roll joints and tuck them in a pack of cigarettes, never in a plastic baggie.

You’re going to be fine, Alison says. Just don’t start thinking you’ve made all the big decisions you’re ever going to make.

Does Karla love her baby? Yes, fiercely. Diane’s got a big, strong name and a grin that could melt the devil’s heart. When they are alone together during the day, Karla hardly wants to set her down for a moment. But becoming a mom has taught Karla plenty of things. That she can get by with less sleep than she could ever have imagined. That it doesn’t take her long to be able to hear herself think at the end of a nine-hour shift, just a short detour through the desert on her way home from work and a little time looking at the stars. That you can love someone with all your heart and still wish she weren’t there.

We wish we had known you back then, a couple of us tell her later. We could have loaned you a little money if you were short. One of us would have driven you up to New Mexico. We wouldn’t have told any of the prayer warriors.

*

What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning?

A sophomore.

*

When she gets home from work, Mrs. Sibley changes into a pair of sweats, clasps her granddaughter between her knees, and stares into her big blue eyes. Well then, Miss Diane, is this all there is to it? She feeds and bathes and rocks her granddaughter and holds her on her lap so they can watch Oral Roberts together.

Mrs. Sibley’s got a scrap of her late husband’s great-great-great granddaddy’s gray uniform framed and hanging in the hallway next to his daguerreotype, and a cedar chest full of pictures from the old family plantation, and she can’t for the life of her figure out how her family got from there to here in just a few generations—here being stuck in West Texas, trying to keep the dust out of your eyes and a roof over your head while Mexicans and feminists take over the world.

When Karla comes home from her shift, she stands in the dark behind her mother and child, watching the television’s blue light play across their sleeping faces. Time for bed, she says, and carries Diane to her crib. Karla loves her mama, but she worries that Mrs. Sibley’s fear and hatred will eventually kill her. What will happen to her mother when she and Diane are gone? After her mother and daughter are tucked in, Karla stands out in the backyard and smokes a joint and imagines a different story for herself, one where she tries a little harder to get to that clinic in Santa Teresa.

They are flaring off casinghead gases at the refinery tonight. The sky is pale, the stars countable. If Karla closes her eyes, it’s easy to imagine her hometown in another fifteen years, or fifty, or a hundred, or whenever they’ve pulled everything they can from the ground. It’s easy to imagine all the drilling equipment gone, the derricks and pumpjacks packed onto flatbeds and driven to some new desert, or coast. She sees her hometown without the churches and bars and the practice field at the high school, without the stadium east of town, or the car dealers who said they were closing down for good during the last bust, or until the next boom. She sees it without the hospital where everyone she knows was born, and everyone will go to die, quickly, if they’re lucky.

Maybe this year everybody’s talking about the Bone Springs shale and the Delaware Basin, but when the price of oil drops, the parking lots will empty out and the man camps will lie abandoned, nothing but rusting beer cans and broken windows and snakes under the beds. But here in town, curtains or drapes or old T-shirts will still cover the windows of little brick houses, and little wooden houses gone to wrack and ruin. There will still be tricycles turned over in the front yard, empty Dr Pepper bottles and sun-bleached toys, tennis shoes with the laces gone, laundry hanging in the backyard, and windowsills covered in sand. And there will still be a woman somewhere who refuses to give up. Every night before dinner, she wipes sand off the kitchen table. Every morning, she sweeps the porch clean. She sweeps and sweeps, but there is always more dust.

You can leave town, Mrs. Sibley tells her daughter, but if you go, I won’t be able to help you no more.

*

How do you walk from Midland to Odessa?

Head west and stop when you step in shit.

*

Dale Strickland is plenty drunk when he finally pays his bill and stands up from the booth he’s occupied for nearly three hours. We watch him walk to the little boys’ room, and when he stops in front of Karla, we can hear him from over here. Hey there, Valentine. You look like you just lost your best friend.

One of us starts to head over and tell her she has food up in the kitchen. Like we’ve done countless times before, for other women and girls, some of us for thirty years. Smile, he tells her. Why don’t you smile? You got a piece of coal stuck up your ass?

Karla leans toward him, and we can see her mouth moving next to his ear. We will never find out what she says, but Strickland draws back his arm and takes aim at her face. He swings and misses and staggers. When he draws his arm back a second time, Evelyn starts shouting for some of the regulars to get him the hell out. Karla is still standing next to the hostess stand with her mouth hanging open, like maybe in her seventeen years of living, no one has ever before tried to hit her.

How do you think this is going to go? Old West justice? Those men take Strickland out to the parking lot and beat him so badly that he never again shows his face around these parts? Well, sure. They’ll rough him up some. But we all know how this goes: We will all laugh and say good thing he was too drunk to land a punch, and Evelyn will eighty-six him for a couple of weeks, or until he comes in and apologizes to Karla.

Nobody wants to overreact and make this worse than it needs to be, Evelyn says. We don’t want to let things get out of hand. When things get out of hand, people start reaching for their guns, and we don’t want anybody reaching for his gun. And we couldn’t agree more. But how nice it must be for Dale Strickland and his kind, we say when Evelyn goes into her office and closes the door, to move through the world knowing everything will work out for them in the end.

To Karla, who cannot remember to smile, we say: This is our bread and butter. We don’t have time for this shit. But we promise ourselves that she will never again have to wait on him, even if it means trading for a good table in our own section, and Evelyn slips her some extra money and tells her to take a few days off, as is her custom in these situations.

The rain has already started when we walk to our cars. All night, great sheets of water pour out of the sky, settling the dust and rinsing the smell of the oil patch away. It drops nearly three inches of water before the storm moves out of town at sunrise. When the rain stops, we take a deep breath. We check for broken windows and keep an eye out for downed electric poles. When the birds start to chatter and sing, we step out of our houses and look up to see nothing but blue skies.

*

How long does it take a couple of Mexican oil-field workers to get a table at Evelyn’s place on a busy Friday night?

That’s no joke. Evelyn walks over with two menus, all smiles and the new orange tint of her hair glowing like a runway light. You boys got your papers? one of the regulars calls from the bar, and Evelyn shoots him a look. Better start packing your bags, the regular says, and some of us laugh and some of us look at the ceiling and some of us look at the floor, but not one of us says a word.