I couldn’t tell the difference between side streets and alleyways, but without so much as a peep from a GPS app, Lena whipped the car around one turn and then another, explaining, “Brady says it’s always in this area somewhere. At least for now. You find the best taco truck one day, and then it disappears. People move on or get shut down, then another one pops up.”

She pulled into a parking lot that seemed to back up to one of the derelict shopping strips. I couldn’t even tell what kind of stores they were from the yellowed doors edged with rust. One was propped open, and I could almost make out someone standing at a checkout, but whether it was auto parts or groceries or secondhand furniture was impossible to say.

A group of people, mostly men, were clustered around a battered white truck with a green awning. Street food was something I missed from the city, and eagerly I followed Lena. The tarry smell of wet asphalt yielded to the tantalizing odor of caramelized onions and browned meat.

We ordered tacos, the good street kind with carne asada or carnitas in thin double folds of corn tortilla and fresh spicy veg on top. The man who took our order nodded, calling it back to a younger woman with the same arched eyebrows and angular shoulders. His daughter? Sister? They were busy, efficient, their hands moving without pause.

Only a few minutes later we had our Styrofoam clamshells and two full-sugar bottled sodas back in the car, because “It’s too damn hot to eat outside,” Lena had said. She wasn’t wrong. Intensified by the concrete and the chrome of cars and construction trucks, the heat rolled through everything, clogging our lungs. How could that woman, just a girl really, endure working in that truck, where the heat from outside must be met with the heat of the grill?

Lena had already eaten half a taco, and I picked one up slowly, my appetite fading.

“Listen,” she said, “about earlier. Have kids, whatever. But you swear to me that we’ll still have fun.” She frowned at the other half of her taco.

I felt a warm glow. Lena, this force of nature, needed me. “Of course we’ll have fun. We’re friends. And that’s all in the future anyway.”

She cut her eyes at me. “I can’t talk to fucking Brady the way I talk to you. It would suck if you just disappeared into some mommy-world.”

“That would never happen,” I promised, and she relaxed.

As I bit into my taco, a car drove past us, stopping at the open door of the mystery shop. Cilantro caught in my fingers as I watched a figure, bundled head to toe in a black hijab, exit the passenger side and hurry up the concrete steps to the open door, where she stopped, as though afraid to enter.