THERE WERE A COUPLE of clothing shops in Murfee, right on Main Street—expensive vintage and specialty shops, and a newer Target over in Nathan—but America didn’t go to any of those. Instead, she drove to the west side of Murfee, over the train tracks, to the place some people still called Beantown. It was where she had grown up, and where she had lived in the same tiny house before the fires. There were several businesses here that only the town’s Hispanics frequented: Mancha’s bodega, a restaurant tacked onto the back of a trailer that served traditional Chihuahuan and Sonoran food, and a sprawling ranch house filled with the sort of Mexican products one would find over the river in Ojinaga. The ranch house also sold clothes, most of them secondhand but some new, which had been bought cheap at the Walmart in Midland and then driven down to Murfee for resale. When she’d been no older than Zita, America had gotten most of her clothes from the place that everyone simply called La Tienda, so she knew it well, but was surprised how out of place she felt now, walking down its dark, cramped aisles, showing Zita one thing or another. Although the girl was polite, it was clear she was used to much nicer things.

On the drive, and now in the store, Zita talked endlessly about all the fancier stores and places she’d been: Mexico City and Guadalajara and Monterrey. All about her brother Martino, who she did not like much because he fought with her papa, and someone called Gualterio, who she did. Also a woman called Luisa, who she’d loved very much, and who America understood was now dead, because whenever Zita said her name, she started to cry—small, hot tears that she fiercely wiped away. She talked about riding horses and having tall men with guns always bring her pieces of her favorite chocolate cake and sitting on Papa’s knee and riding in big black cars with windows thick and dark as smoke.

She talked about how when she slept there were always two or three of those men with guns in her room. Sometimes they slipped her gum and candy and small toys, and once when she couldn’t sleep, one of them with a thick beard had sung her old songs in a beautiful voice, but then he was gone the next morning and never returned.

She said that her papa was an important man and everyone loved him and was afraid of him, too, and she once saw him walk across a green field with a bloody knife that he’d tried to hide from her, and how another time he hugged her and smelled like gasoline and smoke and fire.

She remembered a burning building, once.