comes through that door, or the window, she will be ready for him. Once, twice, three times, Glory runs her fingers across the knife’s smooth steel and leather handle. She is still holding it, still running through the steps—grab the knife, press the catch, slash at the air until the knife connects—when she falls asleep.
In every dream, the desert is alive. She walks carefully, but the moon disappears behind a cloud and she doesn’t see the pile of rocks, or the nest of snakes on the other side of it. When she falls and rises shrieking from the ground, they are already on her, wrapping themselves around her ankles and legs, climbing toward her belly and breasts. One curls itself around her neck and Glory feels the quick, thin flick of a tongue against her eyelash. She stands perfectly still, waiting for them to move off her, to retreat back into the dark. Moonlight shines through the truck’s window. His pupils are black holes surrounded by blue sky. Time to pony up, Gloria, he says, time to pay for all my beer you drank, all this gas I used to get us here. Wait, she says. Wait! She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and wraps her fingers around the leather handle. The knife opens effortlessly and finds his gullet without fail.
Awake now in the dark, Glory moves one finger up and down the raised skin on her belly. About the width of a dandelion stem, the scar begins just below her breasts and follows a meandering path down her torso, as if she has been cut in half and sewn back together. At her navel, it curves around her belly button and continues on, stopping just below her pubic line. When she woke up in the hospital, she had been shaved and her belly was held together with a long line of metal staples. Lacerated spleen, the surgeon told Victor, probably from one of the punches she took to the abdomen. She fought, she fought, she fought. Her feet and hands were wrapped in white bandages, and her hair had been cut to the scalp, a line of stitches wandering across the crown of her head. Victor leaned down and whispered that her mama couldn’t come to the hospital—too many cops, too many questions—but she was waiting for Glory at home. Listen, he whispered to his niece, you survived this. He said something else then, but Glory was already sinking back into sleep and pain, and she couldn’t be sure what it was. She thought he said, This is a war story. Or maybe, this is yours.
* * *
When Victor knocks on the door at 4:30 every morning, he’s holding a chocolate doughnut and a carton of milk. Keep the door locked, he says. If you need help, dial zero for the motel office. After he leaves, Glory lies in bed and listens as the parking lot growls to life. Diesel engines and doors slam. Men, still half asleep, murmur outside her door. She hears the echo of work boots on the metal stairs, and the sudden blast of a car horn when one of the workers has overslept. And she hunkers down in her covers, fingers still wrapped around the knife handle. By five o’clock, the parking lot is mostly empty. Until the kids and wives and girlfriends wake up, the Jeronimo Motel will sit quiet as an abandoned church, and it is then that Glory is able to get her best sleep.
By late morning, when kids start running up and down the stairs and doing cannonballs into the deep end of the pool, when girlfriends and wives are heading out to work the lunch shift or pick up some groceries at Strike-It-Rich, when the woman who tries to clean the room has knocked on the door and handed her a stack of clean towels—no thanks, she says when the woman tries to come in and change the sheets—Glory has had the television on for hours. The soap operas and detergent commercials drone constantly in the background as Glory sleeps and snacks, bathes and showers, peeks through the curtain, watches a shaft of sunlight move across the floor. A couple of times she picks up the phone and thinks about calling Sylvia, but she has not spoken to anyone from school since February. And what would she say? Hello, from the stupidest girl in the world, who climbed into a stranger’s truck and slammed the door shut,