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birth to a flower," she would say. "Lily, Iris, Daisy, those were the kinds of names he was interested in." My mother believed that a name should come from the Bible or at least a saint. She settled on Martha, despite what Jesus had said. She understood how Martha felt, wishing her sister would give her a little help in the kitchen. Anyone would rather sit and listen, but there are some things, like dinner, that needed to be attended to. So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that. My mother had a sudden change of heart then. She saw my father's need for a name that bore no more significance than the bush that grew alongside the house. A name that was as important as beauty itself. Elizabeth lost her child, too, in the end. That was another thing.
    But I didn't think about any of this for a long time, until I was nearly across the California state line. Until then I was crying for my own mother with such a fierceness that I twice had to pull the car over to the side of the road because I couldn't see.
     
     
    August was a lethal time to attempt such a drive, but there was no waiting. A seasoned liar, like the one I became, is in no hurry. But the one I started out as that day in the doctor's office, my knees pressed together tightly, had hands that shook. I looked over my shoulder, cried easily. All of that is gone now.
    The backseat was lined with water bottles and they made a gentle sloshing sound that was almost like an ocean. It was all I could think of to bring. My life, the car's life, were completely intertwined, and water, I thought, would save us both. The sun made waving lines of heat across the black highway. The land was so desolate, so untraveled, that I couldn't imagine why they had built a highway there at all. It was not so much a place as much as a place to get through, a stretch you had to cross if you were ever going to get to where you were going.
    It turned out I had a little money saved. I had started putting some aside when I was taking so many trips. I thought, what if something ever happened when I was on the road, something could break down. I kept a bank envelope under the tarp that covered the spare tire and whenever I had a job I'd put in ten or twenty. I didn't take a dime from Thomas when I left, but I took his car. That car had become my best friend. I could leave my husband but not his car. By the time I pulled into a gas station in Barstow I had spent the little bit I had in my purse, and so I took out the envelope. There was more than six hundred dollars in there, and I kept thinking, I must have known, all the time I was slipping in money, never looking to see how much I had, part of me was planning to leave.
    But worrying about the car made me careful, and most nights I just pulled over to a rest stop and put the water bottles on the floor and slept in the backseat. If something happened to the car I'd be wiped out, stuck in some desert town with no way to go on. In Barstow I asked a station attendant with the name Dwight stitched on his shirt in red cursive letters to look under the hood for me.
    "I'm going a long way by myself," I told him. I leaned under with him, trying to get a little of the shade. It was sickeningly hot, 105, maybe more. "I just wish you'd check to see if everything's all right. I don't want to get out in the middle of nowhere by myself and have something happen," I said.
    Dwight slipped his finger down into one of the belts, gave it a little tug. "Woman shouldn't be traveling alone," he said.
    I knew it could go either way. He could help me out or drop an aspirin into the battery which would send me limping back to him as soon as I was five miles out of town. "I could use your help," I said. "I'm going to have a baby." It was the first time I'd just said it out like that. It was the first time it occurred to me that it could be something to use. "I'm headed just past Las Cruces. My husband, he's stationed out at Fort Bliss. He didn't want