“I’d give anything to hear his voice right now,” I hear her saying, as if through a long tunnel. Her back is still to me. “You gotta admit it, Mike has a very sexy voice.” She sits down on her suitcase. “Especially in the morning. He can sing, too. I love it when he sings.”

I stand up. The blood comes back into my head with a rush. My vision fogs in from the edges, leaving me a circle to look through. There’s a crow sitting on the dead branch of a pine tree in front of me. I watch it until the dizziness clears.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just how I feel.” A trailer truck comes over the hill. I watch the crow flap slowly away, cawing. Grimshaw stands up.

“This one’s ours,” she says. The truck goes by with so much force it almost knocks us over. A long time passes before a green Dodge Ram stops, brand-new, one of those big ten-cylinder diesels that short guys like to drive. We throw our stuff in the back. He’s a feed salesman from Indio, California, driving to a five-day convention in Kansas. It takes me an hour of failed attempts at conversation to get that much out of him. By Mono Lake, I’m completely drained. Hours and hours of sagebrush later, punctuated by billboards advertising slot machines at the next exit, he stops for a bathroom break at Boomtown, Nevada, a casino on Interstate 80.

“You girls wait right here,” the feed salesman says. He locks up the truck, hikes up his pants, and heads into Boomtown. As soon as he’s out of sight, I grab Grimshaw’s suitcase out of the back and throw my backpack at her.

“We have to get away from him,” I hiss.

“Why? He says he’s driving to Kansas. That’s, like, halfway home.”

“But he was so boring,” I groan.

“You find something better, fine,” she says. “I’m not standing out there on that highway again.”

“Okay,” I say, backing away from her. “Take our stuff, go in there, and gamble or something. Just don’t get back in that pickup.” She rolls her eyes, picks up our stuff, and walks away.

A warm wind blows cigarette butts and dead leaves across the parking lot. Tractor-trailer trucks are lined up, snoring like a herd of sleeping buffalo. I head into the thick of them. I find a short, potbellied man standing next to a tank truck, tamping tobacco into a pipe. The name embroidered on the patch on his shirt in red thread is Bob.

“And what can I do for you, missy?” he says when he sees me. He’s completely bald, with bushy brown eyebrows, mustache, and tufts on his earlobes.