Excerpt

Last October for the first time in more than twenty years, I went back to Texas.

I went from San Francisco to my mother’s house in Albuquerque and the next day about mid-morning the two of us left there driving her three-year-old air-conditioned Buick, headed east.

“We’re going to have the sun beating on our backs all the way to Cline’s Corners,” she said. And, “Honey, get Mama a cigarette. They’re in my purse. Do you want to drive?”