lay awake beside his wife, Janelle Ortega, in their camp trailer. His stepdaughters, Carmelita and Rosie, slept in narrow bunk beds opposite the galley kitchen halfway down the camper’s center aisle, their breaths soft and steady.
He didn’t need to check his watch to know the time. The O&G Seismic truck had begun its work promptly at 7:30 the previous two mornings. No doubt the crew was on schedule at the start of this day as well.
Chuck pulled back the curtain over the window abutting the double bed at the back of the trailer. Sleet pelted the glass. Dark clouds hung low over the campground. He dropped the curtain back into place. Another thump sounded, followed by another rolling vibration, as the seismic truck pounded the earth outside Arches National Park to the north, trolling for underground deposits of oil and natural gas.
He rolled to face Janelle. Her eyes were closed, but her breathing was uneven, wakeful. He drew a line down her smooth olive cheek, tracing the gentle arc of her skin with his fingertip. Her eyes remained shut, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
“Hey, there, belleza,” he murmured, lifting a lock of her silky black hair away from her face.
She opened her eyes and turned to him, tucking her hands beneath her pointed chin. “Belleza nadie. Nobody’s beautiful this early in the morning.”
“You are. Besides, it’s not that early. We slept in.”
A powerful gust roared through the campground, tearing at the trailer’s aluminum shell.
She raised her eyebrows. “That’s some storm.”
“As predicted.” He gathered her in his arms and pressed his body to hers.
Sheets rustled in the lower bunk. Janelle raised her head to peer down the walkway over Chuck’s shoulder. “Look who’s awake,” she said. “Buen día, m’hija.”
“Hola, Mamá,” eleven-year-old Rosie responded from the bottom bunk in her deep, raspy voice. “You two woke me up with all your lovey-dovey talking. Are you having sex?”
Chuck released Janelle, who slid away from him to her side of the bed. A snort of laughter sounded from behind the drawn curtain that hid thirteen-year-old Carmelita in the top bunk.
Janelle grinned at Chuck as they lay facing each other. She said to Rosie, “No, honey, we’re not … we’re not …”
“… having sex? But you said that’s what people do when they love each other.”
“There’s a time and place for everything, m’hija. I can’t say this is exactly the right time and place to be asking about that sort of thing, but I guess it’s good you’re remembering all the stuff we’ve been talking about.”
“The birds and the bees,” Rosie confirmed from her bed. “Sex, sex, sex.”
Janelle pulled her pillow from beneath her head, pressed it over her face, and issued a heavy sigh from beneath it.
Chuck folded his pillow in half beside her. Settling the back of his head on it, he looked down the center aisle of the trailer as Carmelita drew back the upper-bunk curtain and leaned over the side of her bed. Her long hair, dark and silky like her mother’s, hung past her head, hiding her face. Rosie lifted herself on her elbows, looking up at Carmelita. Rosie’s hair, also black, was short and kinky and smashed against the side of her skull from her night’s sleep.
Carmelita scolded her younger sister. “You’re never gonna learn the right time and place for anything.”
Rosie flopped back on her mattress and crossed her arms over her thick torso, hands clenched. “Will, too.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“I would,” Chuck said to Carmelita from the rear of the trailer. “Your sister’s going to keep on getting smarter and smarter, just like you. I mean, look how wise and all-knowing you’ve gotten, just in the last few weeks.”
Carmelita sat up straight in the bed, her spine rigid. She gathered the top sheet around her waist, slitted her hazel eyes at Chuck, and whipped the curtain back across the bed, closing herself off from view.
Janelle lifted her pillow from her face and whispered to Chuck, “There’s no need for that.”
“I couldn’t help myself,” he whispered back. “I can’t get used to her, to our new Carmelita.”
“We don’t have any choice.”
Chuck worked his jaw back and forth. Carmelita had been a loving big sister to Rosie and a kindhearted daughter and stepdaughter to Janelle and Chuck until a few weeks ago, when she’d woken one morning with a scowl on her face and a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth. Since then, as if inhabited by an alien being, she had subjected her little sister to incessant teasing, and had responded with little more than monosyllables and grunts of exasperation to all attempts at conversation by Chuck and Janelle.
Chuck knew Carmelita was simply expressing her growing sense of independence as she entered her teen years. But knowing the why of her behavior didn’t make dealing with the reality of it any easier.
“You can’t be the one going on the attack,” Janelle insisted. “You have to control yourself—which is to say, you have to stop channeling your mother.”
Chuck recoiled. “Sheila has nothing to do with this.”
Janelle rested her hand on his forearm. “She has everything to do with this. Especially now, for the next two weeks.”
“Between the two of them, it’s like we’re surrounded.”
“The only way you and I will survive is if we stick together. Juntos. And we have to keep on being nice to Carm. Just like we’ll be nice to your mother.” She tapped his nose with her finger. “Remember, this was all your idea—Sheila, your contract, the four of us crammed together into this teeny tiny trailer for two whole weeks in the middle of winter.”
“It’s not winter yet. Not quite. Yesterday and the day before were great—sunny, warm. Plus, we’ve managed to avoid Sheila so far.”
“The first two days were the calm before the storm.” Janelle lifted the curtain on her side of the bed and peeked out. “Literally.”
Chuck stared at the trailer ceiling, close overhead. At eight feet by twenty-eight feet, the camper had seemed palatial when he’d bought it off a used lot in Durango a month ago for their planned stay in Arches. But by the end of their first day in Devil’s Garden Campground, in the heart of southern Utah’s spectacular red rock country, palatial had become cozy. This morning, with the gale raging outside, the trailer felt hopelessly cramped.
The four of them couldn’t possibly stay inside all day, trapped by the storm. They would drive each other nuts. Nor could Chuck avoid Sheila forever. Maybe today was the day—finally, after four years—to introduce Janelle and the girls to his mother.
He tensed, anticipating the next pulsing beat from the O&G Seismic truck. Instead, a sharp crack sounded from somewhere just north of the campground, much closer than the truck’s location outside the park boundary. A thunderous rumble shook the camper, accompanied by a shock wave
