He knows better.
He doesn't know why. He's reading how I'm standing and it's telling him something, and he stops.
That's the closest he'll come to an apology today and he doesn't know he's making it.
I walk past him onto the gravel.
The desert on this side of a fence is the same desert.
Cholla.Ocotillostanding up out of the ground like somebody's bones, and past all of it the mountains a long way off with snow on the tops.
I stand there and look at that snow because I can. Looking at things is not a right I've had for a very long time and I'm still not used to spending it.
Behind me the gate screams back along its track.
"Mila." He's found some air from somewhere. His boots come around into my sightline and stop short. "Mila, look at me. Please look at?—"
An engine coming down from the buildings, fast, not slowing.
I don't turn around. I've learned things about turning around.
The truck comes off the gravel run and swings wide and stops thirty feet out with the front end pointed at both of us, and the door's open before it's finished rocking.
The woman who gets out of it is small.
She's five-four in boots with cherry red hair.
She's built like a woman who's never carried anything heavier than a phone, and she's wearing a cut with a president's patch on it, and there's nothing about her that would make you cross a street.
The cartel man comes out of the hut with his hands where she can see them.
My mother had an aunt like this. Four-eleven, and the whole family rearranged itself when she came into a room.
The president comes around the door and stops and takes it in.
An open gate. A stranger on her gravel. Her prospect twenty feet back with his face wrecked and his mouth open, blood going down his arm.
Her expression doesn't change.
She lifts the radio in her hand and doesn't key it. "Why the fuck haven’t either of you said shit on the radio?"
Nobody answers.
"I've been on this channel six minutes." She says it like she's asking about the weather, and she sets the radio on the seat behind her without looking. "Marco. You called in a woman on foot at eleven-forty, and then everybody on my property went quiet."
Marco's hands stay up. "Prez?—"
"Not you."
He shuts up.
She looks at the gate. She looks at it long enough that I can hear the wind in the fence and the tick of the truck engine and Finn breathing behind me like he ran here.
Her eyes come off the track and find the latch. "Who opened my gate?"
"I did," Finn says.
It's the first steady thing out of him. His voice comes back for that and only that, and I hate that I notice.
