The hill behind her was covered in cacti, their broad paddles studded with needles that stuck like pins into the rippling warmth over the land.

Tilly dunked her head under. “All I wanted was a little peace from the heat,” she said. “This state is just as bad as the last one.”

She took the curves of Highway 1 with a grim face, slowing for each long bank around the cliffs, but sometimes we got a view, wide and rustling blue, and I could see her faintly smiling. We were tired. We watched the fog burn away. The land was full of dingy, infinite mysteries. The roads were lined with produce shacks. There was an island barely bigger than a shopping mall, tethered to the coast by a thin bridge whose distant dirt heaved flickering oil flames against the blue sky. We passed broad hills that rolled steady and seemed to die a little in the furrows, their grass baked brown like too much sun had pooled there. We saw a whole flock of blackbirds rise from the land and make a shape in the sky, wing to wing, that was larger than any of them would have been able to imagine. “How do they know what to do?” Tilly asked. “I never get that.”

We didn’t stop much. There was one time we saw dolphins, another time we bought pistachios. Mostly, we listened to folk music and tried to keep our truck steady on the curves. Tilly wanted to make sure I hadn’t told my mother about her work. I hadn’t.

“Good,” she said. “Like I said, she wouldn’t get it.”

I thought my mother understood a lot of hard things—more than you’d guess, from the way she spoke—but I couldn’t think of a way to say this to Tilly, the one she’d hurt most.

“How did it start?” I asked. “The prostitution, I mean. If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Not having any money,” she said. “That was most of it.”

She told me about wearing secondhand pants that smelled like other people’s privates and eating meals made from diner condiments: creamer and ketchup, salt and pepper on crackers. “I was poor,” she said. “Not artsy poor. Poor poor.” She told me about the men, how she still heard their voices. Some of them were time bombs, she explained. Tick tick tick. Just waiting to explode.

“Did you ever get hurt?” I asked.

“There are things you shouldn’t tell another person,” she said. “You can’t take them back.”

I told her it didn’t matter about taking them back. I wanted to know.

“It’s not for your sake,” she said. After that she was quiet.

The cliffs got steeper and the turns got sharper. She hugged the road and went slower. Other drivers honked and she cursed them loudly. I cursed them too. She bit the edges of her nails until they bled. I remembered the mocking lilt of Tom’s voice: Nervous Nelly. So she was one, too.