The sky so inky Calliope couldn’t even see a moon, bad or not, she remembered a windstorm she’d driven through before she’d met Andres, before she’d become a mother and her life was bound to anyone other than her own mother, and that only tenuously so. She’d been freer then. Her stomach constricted at the realization: she’d missed that feeling, driving toward no one, home to no one. When she’d suspected morning sickness, the first time, she’d been too impatient to take the pregnancy test home, and found out she was pregnant in the Rite Aid customer’s bathroom. She’d wept in the drugstore parking lot. Googled abortion clinics on her cellphone. The windstorm with Bisabuela, after Chaco Canyon. How those ruins had predicted her whole future, set her on this path. The first entry in the A–Z encyclopedia of the Chaco Canyon Handbook was Abandonment. She’d marked the page with a sticky note and highlighter yellowing the word for her dissertation. She’d wanted to prove what Bisabuela’s people had known, before Catholicism and her mother’s novenas. Abandonment. The Ancient Ancestors had erected these magnificent structures and then departed. They’d sometimes left potsherds, tools, and debris of living, which meant the moves had been hurried, unplanned, perhaps from lack of rainfall and not warring tribes, not external threat. The answer lay buried in the land itself. Bisabuela’s people, wrought from the Chacoans a thousand years later, believed the ruins were anything but—not ruins but breathing still. When Calliope had explored Chaco Canyon as a graduate student she’d wondered why the ancestors would have chosen a place so remote, built a city center in the vast unbroken nothingness, save muted gray-green sagebrush cropping from the dirt. Bisabuela had warned her, Don’t pick up the broken pottery on the ground. The potsherds were for honoring the Ancestors.

The windstorm that had taken Bisabuela had left Calliope with a PhD and a hole in her heart. In the parking lot, she’d held the number for a clinic in her hand and thought of shattered pottery, remnants on the ground. Abandonment. She’d wanted to swallow the shards. She’d gone back into the drugstore, bought a bottle of prenatal vitamins. She’d chosen family, then. Now, six years later, she’d still managed to abandon her family, or they’d abandoned her.

“Momma?”

Calliope bristled.

“Hey, momma? You all right over there?”

“Stop calling me momma.”

Amy sucked air in through her teeth, whistling. Calliope heard Amy whisper “mood swings” sardonically under her breath, but she let it go, wiping her face with the back of her hand. They said nothing. Then, “I didn’t mean any harm,” Amy said. “I just meant ’cause of your belly.”