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I brought my plate up to hide my face but only succeeded in buttering the tips of my hair.

W
E
WEREN’T THEIR OWN
. There was no question about that. Every time a woman in the checkout line at Continental Market got even remotely friendly
with Hilde, she would be rewarded with the tragic details of our story. There followed the standard beaming and cooing at
Hilde and Tina (“such
good
people“), the beatific smile at my sisters and me (“what
lucky
girls“). The only time we could even begin to forget who we were and would never be was when Bub came home from his long
days at PG & E. He always had dirt in the rolled cuffs of his blue jeans and carried his big black lunch box and silver-handled
thermos. When he sat down in his TV chair, my sisters and I ran to mob him, fighting over who got to tug off his steel-toed
boots. Sometimes he did his Quasimodo routine, hunching over so his fingers skimmed the ground. He loped around after us,
making little slurping noises and saying, “Quasi wants kisses. Come give Quasi a kiss.”

When Bub fooled around this way, Hilde would stand at the mouth of the kitchen with her arms crossed and say, “You girls are
getting too old for that.” Maybe so, but when we were the right age to be rolling around with a dad, we didn’t have a dad,
not really, not one who would play with us and give us nicknames and teach us to shadowbox and Greco-Roman wrestle. I felt
drunk when Bub picked me up and swung me around the living room, as if I were swimming in a washing machine, everything dizzying
to blue. He tickled us under our scrawny arms and behind our knees and where our ribs stopped. We squirmed and laughed until
tears came.

“There, that ought to last you a week,” he’d say, but then before we were even into full whine, he was Quasi again, and we
were Esmereldas. We were gypsies.

O
UR REAL DAD’S NAME
was Frank. He was a grill and short-order cook, sliding between restaurants like the Desert Inn and Sambos and Happy Steak,
flashing the manager a killer smile when he’d screw up, showing up late or not at all, moving on when the smile stopped working.
He was moody and shiftless, prone to smacking things or people around when he felt trapped or threatened or had been drinking
too much. Although he was gone more than not and had, on more than one occasion, questioned whether my sisters and I were
his at all, I remember his hank of red-gold hair and freckles and too-wide ultrawatt smile, the starburst of crinkles around
his blue-gray eyes. I remember too the hop-shuffle in his walk as he crossed the parking lot of Sunset Liquor, as if he was
listening to music that we couldn’t hear, something with drums.

We always stopped at Sunset Liquor on the way to the drive-in, where we went pretty much every Saturday night when our dad
was in town; we stopped and waited for him to shuffle in for his six-pack of Coors, his bourbon in brown paper. The lot was
full of old-gum and spilled-soda-pop smells, broken glass in spirograph patterns. Moths pinged against the pink-and-yellow
marquee, sizzled and stuck. My sisters and I sat in the backseat, already in our pajamas, while up front our mother was scooched
all the way down with her feet on the dash. She was headless this way, but we could see part of her arm out the window — a
hand, a thumb pressed to the filter of her cigarette as if she was saving a place for her mouth to go later.

Dad came out of the store, careful of his shiny black lace-ups. He was a little overdressed for the drive-in, wearing a starched
open-collared shirt and creased slacks, overdressed in the same way Roger was when he came visiting, hair slicked darkly in
place, piney aftershave preceding him by a good ten feet. They were both dapper, both tall and thin. Roger didn’t have Dad’s
wild hair, though, and didn’t have the odd mix of nerve and goofiness that was in evidence as Dad eased the Galaxy out of
the liquor-store parking lot and gunned it, less for the speed than for the shriek he got from the backseat and the way our
mother sat up then, grinning, and put her hand on his thigh.

The last movie we saw all together was
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
From the speaker resting on my dad’s half-open window came a strummy ukulele song about raindrops on your head; my sisters
fought silently about who would shuttle the next beer from the ice chest up to the front; over by the snack bar a group of
kids played on the swings, their feet throwing giant shadows over the hoods and hardtops like tentacles, like the Blob. Everything
was monsters and stars in the Morse-code light.

“Look,” I said, and poked Teresa. I pointed to our dad’s head and showed her how to squint so that the red tips of his hair
with more red flickering through looked like Mars on fire.

When I woke up, my foot was asleep, the pins coming on when I shifted. My sisters weren’t moving, and the front seat was quiet.
“Hey,” I heard either Butch or Sundance say, “who are those guys?” I took Penny’s pillow, put it under mine and dragged part
of the blanket over to see stone buildings with arches, the Bolivian sky. Butch and Sundance were lying on a floor looking
bitten and bloody and terrible, and still Butch was talking about the next good thing, Australia this time, the vaults in
the banks falling right open. When they made their big break, running out into the courtyard with cocked pistols, they didn’t
know that everyone but God was out there, waiting with rifles and enough ammunition to put a whole army down. There were rounds
of gunfire, but Butch and Sundance didn’t fall. Nothing fell because the screen was frozen.

“I don’t believe it,” said my dad. “They can’t be dead. They were too lucky.”

“Face it,” Mom said. “They’re Swiss cheese. Still, I won’t be surprised if Hollywood finds a way to bring them back from the
dead and make some more money off of them.”

Dad snorted, an air-through-the-nose sound, and waggled his head. On the way home, we passed the liquor store and the Chevron
station and the McDonald’s with the clay Grimace sprouting from the flower bed like a purple shrub. At a traffic light, Mom
flipped the visor down and checked her hair, tucking a few wayward strands behind her ears, fluffing the back with quick pushes
of her hand.

“How much money do you think the drive-in takes in on a busy night like this one?” Dad asked.

“Hell, I don’t know. How should I know?”

“There must have been two hundred cars tonight. Two hundred cars at three dollars a car. It’d be like picking an apple. That
easy. There’s just the one guy sitting by himself in the ticket booth, and he can’t be more than eighteen.”

She exhaled a mushroom of smoke, flipped the visor back up.

It was its own twilight, that moment. No click and pause, no “watch this,” just dark getting on with its business. My dad
couldn’t stop what he was about to do any more than he could unthink a thought. He would go back to the drive-in with a butcher
knife wrapped in newspaper to pick his apple — but since he wasn’t Butch or Sundance, not fast or lucky or clever, nothing
would go right. The police would catch him before he was even out of the drive-in, and he’d spend weeks in the Fresno County
jail, waiting for the trial, wearing an orange jumpsuit that looked like pajamas and eating, not hunks of stale bread, but
regular food, things we had at home, like baloney sandwiches and pork ’n’ beans and oatmeal. At the trial, the judge would
give him the least-harsh sentence: two years at a work camp in New Mexico, where he was born. He’d be a slave for the state
there, clearing brush, building roads and ditches. Given phone time, he’d call our mom to say in fourteen different ways that
she’d better not be having an affair, by God, she’d better not be or he didn’t know — “shit, please, baby, please” — what
he’d do.

B
EFORE THE LINDBERGHS, ALL
of our placements were in the suburbs of Fresno or in town proper. To get to the Clapps’, you had to drive through the country,
but the Lindberghs’ house
was
the country. Our bus stop at our neighbors’, the Abels’, mailbox lay beyond one barbed-wire fence and two electric ones.
For the first few weeks of crawling under and through these, my sisters and I snagged T-shirts and felt the tingle — hot and
icy at the same time — as electrified wire grazed one of our shoulder blades or the tops of our heads. Then, suddenly, we
were naturals, stooping to the right level automatically, like knowing the steps of a dance not in your head but in your body,
which doesn’t forget.

The Abels raised cows and pigs for slaughter. Several barrels used for catching blood and entrails stood in their barn, and
though they washed them out after every use, we could smell the barrels clear from the side of the road where we waited for
bus number six to take us to Jefferson Elementary. I couldn’t imagine the Lindberghs ever keeping animals like that, for food.
Bub was too soft. You could hear it when he talked to the horses and our dogs, Bear and Badger, and even to the chipmunks
that ran around on the woodpile. Baby talk, low and combed with honey. When the man came out to castrate our two male calves
so they could be sold at auction for beef, Bub had to walk in a circle as soon as the first clamp went on. I felt a twinge
too, when Twister started to bawl, but I watched everything — it was too weird and disgusting not to. The man obviously knew
what he was doing and was quick with his knife, slitting the outer sack like the skin of a fig, then gripping the exposed
testicle between his index and middle finger. It was as pink as a tongue.

Living on a ranch meant we had chores: a flake of hay for each of the horses, morning and night; fresh water in the stock
tank; dry food in the dogs’ big dish in the garage; water for the yarrow, the bug-bitten roses, the fruit trees lining the
drive. I liked the work, liked even the word
chore,
which made me feel like a frontier girl, like Laura Ingalls on her prairie:
I’m going out to tend to the hens, Pa. How long till supper’s on?

Some six months after we came to live with the Lindberghs, Bub decided it was time for my sisters and me to have ponies of
our own. Tina had a pony, a brown-and-white Welsh named Patches the Wonder Horse. Patches grew fatter by the year on English
muffins smeared with peanut butter and jelly, fried squash, melon rinds — pretty much anything we’d give him — and was frankly
more of a dog than a horse. We didn’t even keep him corralled most of the time; he roamed wherever he wanted to, mowing the
lawn, drinking out of the fishpond, lumbering into the garage to sample from the dogs’ bowl. Once, he walked right through
the front door and stood in the entrance hall, his big head swinging around so he could look into the kitchen, where we were
eating dinner.

The livestock auction where we went to get the ponies was thrilling: animal smells and snorts and whinnies, folks swatting
flies and throwing peanut shells into the sand at their feet, and above it all, the auctioneer singing about money. When it
was over, we had Princess and Queenie for Penny and me, respectively, and Velvet for Teresa. They were black, all three of
them, with white stars on their foreheads, but differently shaped ones. Queenie’s star was a moon. Her eyes were the softest,
deepest black; her ears were furred like a bobcat’s, alert and expressive.