She did not know her mama, but was told by everyone she’d been beautiful and had won many awards because she was so pretty.

She described a big accident on the road and men yelling and gunshots and how scared she was when Luisa was slumped over, covered in blood.

She told a story about standing on a hotel balcony on a beach, watching the blue ocean roll and roll and roll.

She talked about sleeping in a barn and walking across the hot desert.

She once saw a fat lizard and it ran from her. She then saw a scorpion fighting another scorpion, until her papa had stepped on them both with his boot.

She asked if she was ever going home again, or if this place was her home now.

Zita talked about so many different places and people—story after story, out of time and out of sequence, like she was quickly flipping through the pages of an immense libro—but she never mentioned America’s mama or papa or other uncles.

Even when America asked about them by name, Zita did not know them. She wondered out loud if they were friends of her papa’s she had never met. He had many, many important friends she did not know.

As they walked around the poorly lit store, America realized all eyes were on her and the girl; all ears were straining to hear Zita’s singsong stories. Even the owner of La Tienda, an old woman with gray hair who’d known America forever, followed them around, pretending badly not to listen.

America walked them out without buying anything.

—

WINDOWS DOWN, warm sunlight heating the seats between them, America drove them back all the way across town to Main Street. To a place called Cowboy Rose, the most expensive specialty clothing store in Murfee. America had never been in the place, but she walked Zita straight inside as if she’d shopped there a hundred times. It smelled like leather and denim and perfume, and America told the girl to pick out whatever she wanted.

As much as she wanted.

Then she followed around behind her, holding out her arms and letting the girl fill them with fancy T-shirts and jeans and skirts and long dresses. As Zita chatted on and on in her lilting Spanish—about singing men with guns and bloody knives and faraway oceans and scorpions and people who were now dead—America took comfort in knowing that no one else in the store understood a word of what she was saying.

TWENTY-SEVEN

When Danny came in from Delcia Canyon, Amé and Zita were gone.

But Fox Uno was sitting at the tiny table in the kitchenette, his phones in front of him. He’d either completed or was about to begin another one of his mysterious calls, but this did not stop Danny from sitting across from him.

“Where is Amé?” Danny asked.