“Your relatives are taking good care of him. You can call him in the morning,” I said, sighing impatiently. It would take only a day to go to Mexicali. We rolled without speaking past art deco facades that had been reduced to sloppily painted barbershops and one hour photo labs.

“If anything should happen to him...”

“Nothing’s going to happen to him,” I said, cutting her off. “You should have thought of this a long time ago. Before you started hooking. Before you dropped out of school. Before you got knocked up. So don’t pull a Loretta Young on me now.” I turned away. It was none of my business. Why did it make me so mad? Were they purely political sputterings on my part? Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lupe chewing her lip some more. I didn’t know if she was angry or trying not to cry.

“I’m not the Farmer’s Daughter,” she snapped. “I’m a lot cooler than that.”

Junkies stood in pools of yellow light outside the bad bars on Western. In silence Lupe drove down Santa Monica Boulevard and onto the ramp of the Hollywood freeway.

I must have passed out again, because when I opened my eyes, we were in the desert and it was the middle of the night. There were a million stars. It made my eyes ache to look at all of them. My face was hot and I was slumped in the seat with my head lolling toward Lupe.

“We’re about thirty-five miles south of Indio,” she told me. “We should hit Mexicali about one-thirty.”

It was cold and black beyond the Fiat’s headlights. Had the man from Casa Guatemala who went to meet Cathy Vega actually waited for her? I wondered as we sped through the dark. Was it true she failed to show up? Or did the person from Casa Guatemala see her and return to LA with a phony story for the others? Maybe they had quarreled. Emma Garcia could have been the one who had gone. She had reason enough to hate Cathy. Cathy Vega stole her man.

Lupe slowed the car as we approached the steel kiosks and concrete bridges that formed the international border. The air was thick with diesel fuel and the smell of beef cooking from hundreds of pushcart kitchens. “What if we can’t find anyone who saw her?” she asked, breaking the long silence between us.

I rubbed my eyes. “Then we’re still in the soup.”

“Sopa. You must learn to speak Spanish.”

A short line of cars waited ahead of us at the border. When it was our turn, they waved us through. Mexicali was just like Tijuana—plenty of auto body shops, upholsterers, bars, discos. Kids rushing the car, trying to sell unattractive mass-produced pottery. A horde of tourists surging down the main street because the bars never close.