A station attendant sells me a sandwich that is wrapped in cellophane and tastes wet and cold after I have peeled off the plastic, and from where I park to eat it you can watch people across the street eating in the diner. Their dinners look better than the sorry thing in my hands. But the tables are full and the men smoke and I feel too shy to go in. There are a couple of older boys with their girlfriends eating, and a group of teenagers hanging out in the parking lot, empty except for their cars. The guys wear these cowboy boots and one of them has a Stetson, his boot heel raised and set on his truck’s chrome bumper. I did not know people like this existed in California. They look like they might even listen to country music. I keep in a shadow so they will not see me or Tomas’s car, but they do not even look my way. My sandwich bread is soaked with mayonnaise and the thin limp piece of lettuce bunches beneath the cold piece of ham. My teeth crunch on ice where it’s been frozen.

I throw the half-eaten lump into a trash can and drive around looking for a motel, but drive up and down the main street and peer down its side streets for ten minutes before realizing that all five of them have no vacancy signs flashing in red. Who would fill these places up is what I want to know. Maybe I should go out and park in the dark roads outside of town. But I am hungry and should eat something first. Otherwise I am liable to wake up in the middle of the night, and hate myself for being a wimp.

Twice I pass down the main street before the diner, peering into its lit booths with its men in plaid shirts and the coatracks with cowboy hats, and the teenagers out front with their pickup truck on huge balloon tires. All the other buildings downtown are dark. A piece of sheet metal clatters against a brick wall, the only noise apart from the distant whistle of wind in the desert.