swollen belly than I was about her. The car bounced on holes and rocks,
brush scratching against its sides and dust coming through the open
windows. Finally, Dad cornered Mom against some rocks. I was afraid
he might smush her with the car, but instead he got out and dragged her
back, legs flailing, and threw her into the car. We banged back through
the desert and onto the road. Everyone was quiet except Mom, who was
sobbing that she really did carry Lori for fourteen months. Mom and
Dad made up the next day, and by late afternoon Mom was cutting Dad's
hair in the living room of the apartment we'd rented in Blythe. He'd
taken off his shirt and was sitting backward on a chair with his head
bowed and his hair combed forward. Mom was snipping away while Dad
pointed out the parts that were still too long. When they were finished,
Dad combed his hair back and announced that Mom had done a helluva
fine shearing job.
Our apartment was in a one-story cinder-block building on the outskirts
of town. It had a big blue-and-white plastic sign in the shape of an oval,
and a boomerang that said: THE LBJ APARTMENTS. I thought it stood
for Lori, Brian, and Jeannette, but Mom said LBJ were the initials of the
president, who, she added, was a crook and a warmonger. A few truck
drivers and cowboys had rooms at the LBJ Apartments, but most of the
other people who lived there were migrant workers and their families,
and we heard them talking through the thin Sheetrock walls. Mom said it
was one of the bonuses of living at the LBJ Apartments, because we'd be
able to pick up a little Spanish without even studying.
Blythe was in California, but the Arizona border was within spitting
distance. People who lived there liked to say the town was 150 miles
west of Phoenix, 250 miles east of Los Angeles, and smack dab in the
middle of nowhere. But they always said it like they were bragging.
Mom and Dad weren't exactly crazy about Blythe. Too civilized, they
said, and downright unnatural, too, since no town the size of Blythe had
any business existing out in the Mojave Desert. It was near the Colorado