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

  WE 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.

  OUR 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.

  BEFORE 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 d
oesn’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.

  The new ponies quickly became our pets. We braided their manes and tails, twisted dandelions into their forelocks. We played a vaulting game that Tina invented, where we ran up behind the ponies, jumped up by putting our hands on their big butts, scooted across their backs and slid down their necks. It’s a wonder they didn’t kick us in the head for this.

  Bub and Tina taught us to ride. We practiced first in the corral, then in the field, and soon we were skilled enough to be turned loose on the neighborhood, which at that time was so scarcely populated that we could have ridden out to where the foothills began without running into so much as ten fences. On Saturday afternoons, we’d put bareback blankets on the ponies, pull canteens over our heads so they thumped against our hipbones and head out for the afternoon. We’d ride along the dry ditch or toward the orange orchards or over to Shaw, where Tina said developers had tried to get a golf course started, but no one came out to play. It was so grown over that we were surprised when we’d canter into a sand trap buried under switchgrass and foxtail, or trot onto the raised flat patch where the golfers were supposed to tee off. It was like Planet of the Apes, how we could see the fringe of one abandoned world buried beneath another.

  No matter where we headed first, we always ended up at our favorite fig tree. Tying the ponies to low branches, we’d pull the blankets off to have something to sit on in the shade. We’d take long pulls from our canteens, though the water tasted like feet and tinfoil, and eat peanut-butter sandwiches, smushed and warm from being in their paper bag. Once, we all fell asleep like this, sprawled out under the fig tree. It was so hot that day that I felt as lumpy and heavy as a bale of hay. We each lay on our blankets, not talking, and looked up through the layers of leaves, which shifted and threw soft, spotty light on parts of the tree and the ground and our bodies. Penny leaned back against the trunk with her eyes closed. Circles of light moved in her hair. They looked like butterflies.

  NEARLY EVERY DAY OF our time with the Lindberghs, Hilde was up by six-thirty and out on the lawn, standing bull’s-eye in the circle of the big green garden hose, her thumb on the opening, drawing the water into small circles and figure eights. She was nuts about that lawn. We had a gunlike spray attachment and several rainbow sprinklers, but she never used them; she trusted the hose. During the school year, when we walked by her on the way to the bus, she rarely looked up she was so into it. In the summer, she started banging on the outside of our bedroom windows around eight. “Aufstehen, aufstehen, Falle Leute,” she yelled: “Get up, you lazy people.” She came in panting while we sat at the table with our bowls of puffed rice, her hands fluttering at the hem of her blouse, a light sweat beading on her upper lip. “What’s wrong with you girls? I’ve been working for hours.”

  By nine o’clock, whatever the day or season, Hilde was out the door and on her way to Noreen’s house. She had breakfast and lunch there, stopped by Shop ’n’ Bag or Continental Market for groceries, then raced home to have dinner on the table when Bub rolled up the drive at five-thirty. At first I thought it was a little kooky that she was always at Noreen’s, but soon I understood: she was lonely. Who wouldn’t be, hanging around the house all day? Once you did the dishes and vacuumed, what would there be to do? Soap operas would help, but she got those at Noreen’s. They sat and crocheted and talked excitedly back to the TV when something good happened. Days of Our Lives was their favorite — “The Show,” they called it, as in “Hurry up and get in here, Hilde, or you’ll miss THE SHOW.” God forbid.

  The only thing Hilde loved more than her days with Noreen — yammering over tuna salad, keeping up with The Show, beginning another afghan, chair cover, toaster cozy — was her daughter. Trying to make Tina happy was perhaps Hilde’s truest mission. She kept Tina’s bottom dresser drawer filled with bar chocolate and diet cookies and boxes of Jell-O, which Tina liked to eat raw, late at night, dipping in a wet finger and licking off the powder. Tina had more new clothes and nicer ones than we did, and received double our allowance, but we weren’t overly jealous. How could we be once we learned Tina was the reason we had come to the Lindberghs’ in the first place? Bub and Hilde had planned to have several more children after Tina, and although they tried for years to conceive, these attempts were foiled by what Hilde mysteriously termed “female problems.” They might have given up if not for Tina, who wanted siblings as much as she had ever wanted anything. We were the solution. Adoption was too permanent, but foster kids were like ponies bought at auction — you could always take them back. Bub called the Department of Welfare and settled on us because Mrs. O’Rourke insisted that if someone didn’t offer to take us soon — three children together were so hard to place — we’d have to go to a group home. That could be rough, she counseled; who knew what would happen to us there. Bub convinced Hilde it was the right thing to do. They signed the papers, took the preparatory class. Everything was set until the week before we were to arrive, when Hilde found the thermostat in the hall had been messed with and the heat turned on — this, when temperatures outside were still in the nineties. They asked Tina if she’d tampered with it, and she lied.

  “I know you did it,” Bub said. “Just admit it, and everything will be fine.”

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

  Bub told Tina she’d blown everything, that we weren’t coming anymore because, as a liar, she didn’t dese
rve sisters. He let her spend a tearful night reflecting on her wrongdoing, then changed his mind. That’s the story of how we almost got sent to the group home, one Tina liked to tell when she was feeling particularly monarchical.

  I wasn’t sure she didn’t have plans to rule the world, our Tina. Maybe it was an only-child thing. We never played a game of Monopoly in which she wasn’t the banker and didn’t get the car as her game piece. Even in pretend games she was tyrannical: her favorite person to be was this filthy rich rancher with ten thousand horses and a crop of cowboys who worked for her and had to call her “Ma’am,” tipping their hats as they said it. She ordered us around, telling us who we were supposed to be — a cowhand or cook or Indian guide. She ordered her parents around too and was rewarded with a brand-new five-dollar bill or shiny red cowboy boots or a store-bought violin. If we had to borrow instruments from school, flat and black and smelling of other kids’ hands, well then it was only right and fair. Tina was Bub and Hilde’s real daughter.

  Were we real to anyone? That was hard to say. Our father was who knows where, maybe in prison again. Our mother was so many years away that I had difficulty conjuring the smallest detail: the shape of her eyes, her smell, the way her hands moved in a gesture. And why would I want to think about her? If I allowed myself any image, it was a quick still of her as she must have been the day she left in Roger’s car: her head back on the pale vinyl, eyes closed so she could feel it all, the Indian-summer sun, wind nuzzling her hand like a cat. With her eyes shut tight, she could be a passenger, just that, rocketing toward what was still possible. How good it must have felt to let the road have its way, the dark line of it pulling hard enough to comfort.