“That’s all I know. They said the details are up to us. We can be a married couple or girlfriend and boyfriend or whatever, just as long as we cross the border successfully that’s all they care about.”

“Of course, that’s all they care about. They aren’t going to be the ones facing years in prison if they get caught.”

“Years?” Her mouth drops open.

“Yes, of course! That’s one hundred pounds of methamphetamine. That’s going to be one hell of a loot if they catch us with it.”

Dorothy hangs her head and slouches her shoulders, suddenly aging thirty years.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispers.

23

Nicholas

When I try to convince her…

My heart starts to pound but I don’t let it show. I need her to do it and, if I want to convince her, I can’t look desperate.

“It’s going to be okay, Dorothy. We’ll have a great cover story—“

“Which is?” she asks, folding her arms across her chest.

“We’re dating. We’ve been dating for a while. You want me to propose but I don’t want to be tied down. I’m not a cheater but I’m just one of those guys who doesn’t need a piece of paper to define who he loves.”

She leans against the wall and props up her foot as well. Dressed in flip-flops and a long flowing dress, she looks exactly like someone who would vacation down in Baja.

“Why are we coming back?” she asks.

“Your mother fell down again,” I say without missing a beat. “We’re coming to check on her.”

“Where do we live most of the time?”

“The RV. We’re full-timers. At least, for the last year and a half. We love life on the road. We love meeting new people and seeing new places.”

I tell her all of this and a lot more. The story comes out of my mouth so easily I feel like I’ve told it a million times before.

“How do you feel now?”

“I still don’t feel too good about having so much …of that stuff in there,” she says in a quiet whisper.

I shrug. “Me either, but no one else is going to pay us that much money to drive an RV across the border.”

My confidence and my story seems to put her at ease and she shows me the address that she got from Big Dipper.

When we look it up, it’s just a few streets over. The RV is not particularly big but, luckily, it looks like it has been through a lot.

With our story, we need our home to look like it has more than a few miles on it. The inside is filled up with clothes and junk, just enough so that it looks like it’s well lived in.