A Tioga motor home with Kansas plates pulled in and swallowed up a huge tankful of fuel while Nacio washed the wind-shield and checked the oil. He was just finishing checking the air pressure in the last tire when Bree pulled up behind him. Naturally, Ronnie hurried out to wait on her before Nacio had a chance.
After running the motor home driver’s credit card through the machine, Nacio went over to the red Toyota Tacoma. “Hey, Ronnie,” he called, without looking in Bree’s direction but making sure his voice carried through her open window, “I’m going to grab a soda.”
With that, Nacio limped off across the parking lot. The doctors kept telling him that eventually the leg would get better, but he doubted it. He went inside, bought himself a soda, and then came outside to sit on the picnic bench left behind by a short-lived and now departed latte stand. There he waited for Bree to join him.
Nacio hated having to meet her this way, having to sit stiffly on the bench as though they were nothing more than a pair of strangers passing the time of day. It was only when they were alone that they could be themselves- free to be young and in love.
He was struck by the irony of their living a real-life version of the Romeo and Juliet roles they had played all those months earlier. According to Bree, her father hated Mexicans, and Ignacio’s Aunt Yolanda was forever pointing out the folly of mixed dating, which inevitably led to the far worse folly and inevitable heartbreak of mixed marriages. Such warnings had fallen on two sets of determinedly deaf ears.
Brianna O’Brien had returned to Nacio Ybarra’s hazy line of vision while he was still so groggy from the anesthetic and painkillers that at first he had imagined her to be some kind of ethereal being-an angel perhaps- rather than the same flesh-and-blood, blond-haired beauty whose lips had breathed fire into his one hot June night in Tucson several months earlier. Even after the drugs wore off, he still expected she would simply disappear. But she didn’t. Instead, she visited him every day of the three weeks he was stuck in the Copper Queen Hospital. Each time she came to his room, she brought with her a sense of joy and laughter and the hope that, although his leg was undeniably broken, his life was certainly not over.
Those visits had continued for a while even after Nacio was released from
Bree would often come into the station in the late afternoons, pulling up to the full-service pumps about the time Uncle Frank went home for dinner. While Nacio pumped her gas and checked her tires, oil, water, and windshield fluid, while he cleaned all her windows and polished her rearview mirrors, they would hurriedly make arrangements for when and where they would meet again-often at a secluded spot halfway between Bisbee and Douglas on a long-deserted ranch road that ran alongside the railroad line near the Paul Spur Lime Plant.
They both lived for weekends like this one, though, when Bree would tell her parents she was going to New Mexico to visit her friend Crystal Phillips, and Nacio would tell Uncle Frank and Aunt Yolanda he was going camping with some of his friends from school. From Friday night until Sunday after-noon, it would just be the two of them. Usually they would rendezvous at a secret meeting place in the Peloncillo Mountains, east of Douglas, at a wild, deserted place called Hog Canyon. Once they met up, they’d spend the night there, sleeping on an air mattress in the back of Bree’s truck. The next day, they’d leave Nacio’s old Bronco parked out of sight somewhere in the canyon and head out for parts unknown. They loved wandering around in out-of-the way places in New Mexico, an area where they weren’t likely to run into anyone they knew.
Bree always had plenty of money. They went where they wanted with the understanding that by three o’clock Sunday afternoon she would drop him off at his car and they would go their separate ways. That was how this weekend was supposed to work. Now, though, with Nacio unable to get away until sometime Saturday morning, he supposed they would have to scrap the whole thing.
“You look like you just lost your best friend,” Bree said, sitting down on the same bench, but not so close that it looked as though they were actually sitting together.
“Aunt Yolanda’s still sick. Uncle Frank’s taking her up to Tucson to see an internist, and they won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon,” Nacio told her. “I’ll have to close tonight and open tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Bree. I don’t know what to do.”
Bree had spent every moment of that week longing for Friday, when the two of them could be together. Still, it never occurred to her to argue with him about it or try to change his mind. Ignacio had told her enough about his background-about how much his aunt and uncle had done for him-that she knew he owed them everything. Whatever they needed him to do, Nacio would do without question or else die in the attempt.
“Do you want to come over to the house?” Nacio asked after a pause. “Uncle Frank’s up in Tucson. No one will know.”
“Your neighbor will,” Bree objected. “If she tells on us again like she did the last time, your aunt will have a fit.”
Nacio nodded. “I guess we’ll just have to forget it, then,” he said reluctantly. “Unless you want to go back home and tell your parents you changed your mind and decided to leave tomorrow morning instead of tonight.” Bree considered. It had been hard enough to convince her parents that she needed to go back to Playas yet again. If she retuned home, there was a chance Bree’s father would put his fool down and not allow her to leave a second time.
“What if I went on out to the mountains tonight and waited you to catch up with me tomorrow morning?” Bree asked.
Nacio swung around and stared at her in disbelief. “All by yourself? Wouldn’t you be scared?”
Bree shrugged. “Not that scared. I’d be in the truck. That would he safe enough.” She looked at him and smiled. “Besides, if it means getting to see you later instead of not seeing you at all, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Ignacio felt a sudden warm glow in his chest, a feeling that came over him whenever he realized how much Bree loved him, how much she cared. Aunt Yolanda was always saying that the only reason Anglo girls hung out with Hispanic boys was because they were sluts, not good enough to catch an Anglo boy of their own. Even so, she said, they always acted like they were better than everyone else and treated their Mexican boyfriends like shit. But Bree wasn’t like that with Nacio Ybarra. Not at all.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he told her at once. “It could be dangerous. There are bears out there, to say nothing of mountain lions…”
“Don’t worry,” Bree returned with a winning and confident smile. “I’ll be fine. No mountain lion in its right mind would dare attack me. I’m a Puma, too, remember?”
Nacio was still laughing as Bree stood up and walked away with her hips swaying and her ponytail bouncing playfully hick and forth in the warm summer sun.
CHAPTER TWO
Joanna Brady stopped at the door of her daughter’s room and peered inside. Ten-year-old Jennifer Ann was sitting cross-legged in the midst of what looked like chaos. Frowning in concentration, she was going down a list checking off items as she went. The next day she was due to leave home for a two-week stay at Whispering Pines, a Girl Scout camp located in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.
“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.
“Okay,” Jenny replied. “I think I have everything. All I have to do now is get it into the duffel bag.”
“Do you want some help?”
“No, Mom,” Jenny replied. “The directions say I’m sup-posed to pack it myself.”
“All right, then,” Joanna said. “But don’t stay up too late. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
Feeling slightly useless, Joanna backed away, went to her own room, and got ready for bed. The swamp cooler was running. She usually turned it off overnight, but the last few days had been so miserably hot that tonight she left it on.
“See there?” she said, addressing her husband Andy and counting on the drone of the cooler to cover her voice. After all, Andy had been dead since the previous fall, the victim of a Colombian drug lord’s hired assassin, but
