Today there was an eerie humidity in the air. This must have been what stirred her'even a tinge of moisture in this arid place was rare and fleeting. Emily lifted up her chin and yawned. Head back at the wide open space above her, she closed her eyelids. She had to keep her mind unfocused for just a few minutes longer.

Behind her, sharing the concentrate slab where she sat, the laundry mat was strangely quiet. Before her stretched the pale pebble lawn of the old motel that had been converted into apartments. The dusty yard was just the right shade of jaundiced tan to match the stucco of the building. She sat perfectly still, feet to the gravel, one hand clutching the Corona.

She was beginning to feel submissive to the alcohol. It usually took about three well-placed imports to distract her from this dismal place. She opened her eyes slowly. To her right the tail-end of an old pink Chevy, tires and all, protruded high on the wall of the laundry mat. It was the only thing that pretended to offer any levity to her situation.

Mother Ava's situation was worse: She had fallen into a coma two nights before. Jennie, the older daughter, had pulled into town in her Buick and begun funeral arrangements. Although she had commandeered the care of Ava from a distance, she still found the right to criticize Emily's handling of it. The two had never discovered much love for each other. And now, with plenty of blaming and snarling on both sides, all pretense of affection had been scrapped. The end result was that Jennie had ousted Emily from the house.

Jake had moved Emily into the musty end apartment, unable to reason with her sister. It was obvious that Jennie was quite proud of her reorientation into an educated Northerner. She was not exactly keen on letting the stringy-haired likes of Jake--a washed-up soul by all accounts--tell her how to conduct her family's affairs.

Everyone in town knew that 'Mother Ava'� was actually Great-Aunt Ava. For a long time no one had been able to make much of Emily's mother or that side of the family. Emily had always wondered why her mother had deserted her father. One day, on one of the few conversations she had with him before his death, her father had rather abruptly explained it to her: 'Hell,'� he had said, 'It's not like I knew her very well.'� At least then Emily was no longer baffled.

Emily's father had passed her off to Ava over the protest of the rest of his family, who were fairly bewildered and embarrassed with the whole thing. Ava took Emily in as a single, older woman with a nearly-grown daughter of her own. It seemed to Emily that Ava was the only one with any semblance of a soul. She thought it might have been because Ava had been widowed three years into her marriage, her husband killed in a hunting accident.

. . .

The last few nights had been spent with a maniacal consciousness throbbing within her skull. Sleepless yet again, Emily had no choice but to stare at the roach-encrusted carpet as she lay in wait for the slow-evolving sunrise. A devoted weariness had become her companion since the beginning of Ava's steady decline.

Fingering the mouth of the bottle, she sluggishly recognized that this was not what she wanted. Irritated with herself, she set the bottle down. A bleary recollection of the incident that had driven Jake away began to form, even though she had no desire to think back to it. Unavoidably, she began to picture Jake's black, wide-set eyes and the way they sat in the caramel skin of his face.

A shiver of discomfort passed through her. He had always held attraction for her, far past his initial spurning of her when she was fourteen. Stupidly, she'd tried to impress him with her underage drinking and short skirts. Back then he was the rebel image she craved'the isolated sinner who she identified with, who might possibly offer her some exit from herself.

Three years later, she was lucky that the worst thing he had taught her was how to ride a cycle and how to enjoy a good smoke. This revelation, though, was something she was only beginning to digest. It was not that she had not wanted more and not that she hadn't done her best to seduce him, either. He, though, with a staunch will---but not without sweat---had resisted that temptation. At twelve years older than Emily, he was now nearly thirty.

A few days prior, following the fall-out with Emily, Jake had headed out of town on his bleached-out cycle. Barely past the county line he realized what a fool he was being and snapped the bike into the parking lot of a Speedy Mercado. He was getting a little old to let temper tantrums fuel quick escapes into the desert.

The truth was he was exasperated. Nine weeks ago, when Ava's diabetic condition deteriorated so much that she had to be hospitalized, he had begun wrestling with what could be done about Emily's situation. Although there might be the chance that a local pastor or teacher might take Emily in, he still held to the hope that family sensibilities, though dormant and ill-expressed, might win out in time.

He was fairly sure Emily could not be forced on Jennie or vice versa. Emily was seventeen'Both she and Jennie were acting like being thrust into womanhood a few years early was something Emily could handle. Jake knew better, and could not understand why they preferred to demonize each other and to separately suffer the loss of Ava. He could see their ridiculous shutting out of each other lasting far into their stubborn futures.

Jake sat idling by the string of Ocotillo at the side of the convenience store like the spot was the most pivotal stopping place of his life. He decided he would stay away a few days but that he would not be totally selfish in it. An uncle lived not too terribly far away who Emily had been in touch with. Jake had already made him aware of Emily's predicament, but now he thought a more direct plea for help was in order.

Uncle Bryan was the only one of the few, fragmented relatives who had showed any real interest in Emily. If phone calls didn't work, a face-to-face meeting would have to. Jake would head out the 400-or-so odd miles and present the case to the uncle. He was determined that Bryan was going to have to take a stand in the matter. Perhaps he could be the one to bridge the gap between the two sisters'if need be by grabbing a hold of each and shaking some sense into them.

For all his wildness, Jake had never patronized Ava. He had a healthy admiration for this older woman who had not once been condescending to him. It had been people like Ava who had allowed him to take early retirement from his perpetual drifter status by supplying him with enough odd jobs to stick around town. Over time he managed to join up with a friend in the mechanic business so that he now had a more-or-less permanent job that still let him meander about the canyon roads when he felt like it.

Ava had always been cautious with Jake but the two had reached an understanding. Perhaps it was because she viewed him as a child who no one had taken the initiative to rescue.

. . .

Sitting on the porch of the washeteria, Emily surveyed the bleak, bladeless yard of the L-shaped building before her. At the bend of the old motel, Jake's barbeque grill stood out like a black beetle in the otherwise pale and vacant lot. She began remembering their last conversation, the one that had driven him away, and solemnly wondered what apology she could make. ....

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