Esperanza kept staring at her empty hands. I wished I had something to put in them, something that would be wonderful for her to look at.

"I hope you don't mind me talking about Turtle."

Her eyes flew up at me like a pair of blackbirds scared out of safe hiding.

"Estevan told me about Ismene," I said. "I'm sorry. When I first found out you'd taken pills, I couldn't understand it, why you'd do such a thing to yourself. To Estevan. But when he told me that. God, how does a person live with something like that?"

She looked away. This conversation would have been hard enough even with two people talking. No matter what I said, it was sure to be the exact wrong thing to say to someone who recently swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin. But what would be right? Was there some book in the library where you could look up such things?

"I guess the main thing I came up here to tell you is, I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out."

She had tears in her eyes, but that seemed better somehow than nothing at all. "It's terrible to lose somebody," I said, "I mean, I don't know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse."

After a long time I said, "He's crazy about you."

I went over and took one of the hands in her lap and held it for a second. Her skin felt cold and emptied-out, like there was nobody home.

As I left to go back to work I saw the woman with the cardboard box, still in the living room. She was sorting through a handful of possessions she had laid out on the sofa-a black skirt, a small book bound in red vinyl, a framed photograph, a pair of baby's sneakers tied together by the laces-and carefully putting them back into the box.

On Wednesday, just as I was finishing up the last patch of the day and getting ready to head for home, I spotted Lou Ann stepping off the bus at the Roosevelt stop. I yelled for her to wait up, and she came over and talked to me while I used the water hose to wash the black dust off my hands. One thing I can tell you right now about tires: they're dirty business.

Lou Ann had just been for a job interview at a convenience store on the north side. She'd left Turtle and Dwayne Ray with Edna and Mrs. Parsons.

"So the first thing the guy says to me is 'We get a lot of armed robberies in here, sweetheart.' He kept on calling me sweetheart and talking to my boobs instead of my face, this big flabby guy with greasy hair and you just know he reads every one of those porno magazines they keep behind the counter. 'Lots of stickups, sweetheart, how do you hold up under pressure?' he says. Holdup, that was his idea of a big hilarious joke. Jeez, the whole thing gave me the creeps from the word go."

I could see that she had dressed up for this interview: a nice skirt, ironed blouse, stockings, pumps. In this heat. The humiliation of it made me furious. "Something better's bound to come along," I said. "You can hold out." I wiped my hands on a towel, hollered goodbye to Mattie, and we headed down the sidewalk.

"I hate that place," she said, nodding back over her shoulder at Fanny Heaven.

'Yeah," I said. "But on the bright side, Mattie says they don't do a whole lot of business. She thinks having a place called Jesus Is Lord right next door kind of puts a hex on it."

Lou Ann shuddered. "That door's what gets me. The way they made that door handle. Like a woman is something you shove on and walk right through. I try to ignore it, but it still gets me."

"Don't ignore it, then," I said. "Talk back to it. Say, 'You can't do that number on me you shit-for-brains,' or something like that. Otherwise it kind of weasels its way into your head whether you like it or not. You know those hard-boiled eggs they keep around in jars of vinegar, in bars? It's like that. After a while they get to tasting awful, and it's not the egg's fault. What I'm saying is you can't just sit there, you got to get pissed off."

"You really think so?"

"I do."

"The thing about you, Taylor, is that you just don't let anybody put one over on you. Where'd you ever learn to be like that?" Lou Ann wanted to know.

"Nutter school."

Chapter 11 Dream Angels

In the third week of May, Lou Ann got a job as a packer in the Red Hot Mama's salsa factory. This meant that she stood elbow to elbow with about a hundred other people in a sweaty packing line dicing chiles and tomatillos and crushing garlic cloves into moving vats, with so much salsa slopping onto the floor that by the end of the day it sloshed around their ankles. The few who hoped to preserve their footwear wore those clear, old-fashioned rainboots that button on over your shoes. Most people gave up the effort. On days when they were packing extra hot, their ankles burned as if they were standing on red ant hills.