From a distance, Houston looked ugly as ever, skyscrapers zoned next to churches next to cul-de-sacs; roads at interrupted angles, all cracked. Whoever thought it was a good idea to build helter-skelter on a wetland? Nature always pushed up from underneath. Pythons and gators in the bayou, sewage in the street when it rained too hard. But the sunsets, thick and pink. The bats that roost in colonies under bridges, patterns over the dusk when they hunt.

We jutted through a cloud layer and all that disappeared. I took a Xanax from the bottle in my bag. The pilot came over the intercom, called the cabin ladies, announced our altitude. I dozed off, woke to his voice. “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico,” he fuzzed, “named, believe it or not, after a radio quiz show popular in the 1950s.” The girl next to me rolled her eyes and opened a pack of gum. I tapped her shoulder and she lifted her headphones.

“Could I?” I pointed to the gum and she held out the pack.

“This your first time with Blaze?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Sedona is a spiritual place,” she said and put her headphones back on.

I had heard it before. A month before I left for LA, my mother had made an appointment with a new naturopath. “The ache,” she’d said, “it’s deeper lately,” and asked me to drive her.

The office was on the seedy side of South Houston, manned by a woman with chin hair, a binder of prescriptive herbs. “You harbor hatred,” she told my mom. “It’s a toxic place to come from.” She suggested tinctures, meditation, a retreat she hosted in a Sedona vortex. Three thousand for the weekend. “Toxicity blocks a body,” she warned. “Tumors, artery clogs. You need to cleanse.”

“Three thousand isn’t feasible,” my mother said, her voice at its most Southern. I thought that meant she had the woman’s number. But she paid a hundred dollars for an ionic footbath session, my mom with her feet in a magnetized tub of water that frothed blue and gray the longer she sat. The gray was heavy metal, the naturopath said, the blue was intestinal sludge.

“I feel cleared out,” my mom said after. We left with the pain shrunk and managed, but three days later it returned like it had rested and grown.

“That bitch,” I said and googled footbath science, discovered the scam.

“Absolutely N-O,” my mom said, from the couch. “Women don’t call other women the B-word.”