She leads me into what must be the hottest kitchen in California, and that’s where we stay, chain-smoking Grimshaw’s menthols and going through three pots of lousy coffee. The house is tiny—just the kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Mike doesn’t want us to talk because he has a bunch of really important phone calls to make, which have to happen in the kitchen, so I lower my voice to a whisper and tell her about my trip, which makes it come out like an adventure, instead of what it really was, four days of bleakness and depression and dirty windows, and a little girl in Texas teaching me words in Spanish, and the guy in the advanced stages of alcoholism falling asleep on me with his cowboy hat rubbing against my neck all the way from Albuquerque to Phoenix. She listens for a while, then she wants to know how my classes are going.

“I had this really big book I read all the way across, Moby Dick. People thought it was the Bible, and I got blessed a bunch of times in Spanish.”

I get out Moby Dick, and she sees all the books in my backpack. “Tell me you applied to college,” she says.

“I didn’t have time!”

She shakes her head and sighs. “How’s—” And then she coughs. I know who she’s talking about. Junior Davis. A cough is code for someone whose name we aren’t supposed to say out loud. Mike is standing over us, with one foot up on a chair, frowning into his phone. I make her stand up, then I get her on the floor in a headlock, while she laughs, then I stand up and hold her arm up in victory.

“All-State.”

Her eyes open wide. “The championship?”

“Yup.” We sit back down. And then I make the sound of a cracking a can of beer, lift it to my mouth, and chug it.

“No!” she says.

I nod my head. “Afraid so.”

She looks stricken. “But”—cough—“is the only person in the whole Valley who doesn’t drink!” she says.

I shrug. “He’s failing math. For the fourth time. And also—”