Taco know-how that Maria had grown up with and that had played no small part in winning over her Grecian goddess, oh—once upon what seemed so long ago as the trip wore on, as it became obvious that no kind of taco know-how was going to bring them back as they once were.

Anyway, it was early that morning when they started out toward Truchas—Maria’s ancestral village just northeast of Santa Fe—where they had indulged themselves the night before at an overpriced bed and breakfast inn and taken a hot tub bath at an equally overpriced West Coast lifestyle spa.

Helena was at the wheel as usual, and Maria, who admittedly had little sense of direction, did her best at co-piloting with a state map. Somewhere along the road, they found a convenience store and stocked up on some not-all-that-healthy but at least survivable edibles, like buffalo jerky and Blue Sky sodas, thinking that farther along they would find a nice picnic spot where they would relax and enjoy the view of the magnificent Sangre de Cristo range. But as it turned out, the pair did not have a picnic that afternoon, much less make it up to Truchas.

(On another day, however, they did get to Maria’s grandmother’s ranchería and were welcomed by her long-lost tíos and primos and taken out to the camposanto to visit the graves of her hispano and mestizo ancestors of the last four hundred years.

This gratifying visit would lead Maria that following autumn—having always felt innately displaced in California, especially in that monstrous metropolis of the angels where she was raised—to say an overdue goodbye to Helena and start a new life on her own, in what she felt to be through blood ties, her true native homeland.

And it was a very sad parting, indeed. Maria left behind the two Greek cats, which tended to get neurotic the farther away they got from their familiar turf, but she did take along Xochitl, the Aztec migrant cat, who on the other hand adapted very well to whatever climate.

She left Helena everything else, too—oh, guilt was a bottomless well—packing her clothes, books on the healing arts—only the ones with the little cat sticker inside that read “Ex Libris: Maria,” of course—and the CD player—which was rightfully hers, or at least would be in two more payments.

So this account which leads us temporarily astray from our story is about all kinds of beginnings and endings but mostly, like all accounts, about what goes on in the middle. Maria, tarot reader and pseudo-poet, herself would have said—and many metiches who later made it their business to know who she was, agreed—that even this existence of ours has no start and no finish but is the continuance of a journey on an endless, unpaved road.