That evening, after closing up the store, Celia went home to eat dinner with her parents. They had long ago given up all business responsibility to her, and now spent their retirement days caring for their desert tortoise named Pico, working on puzzles, and reading great works of literature. They were like any other upper middle class California couple who threw big parties and went to the opera. Except, of course, they lived in a trailer in the desert that only barely had running water from a nearby well. And yet, somehow, despite appearances, the loneliness of the desert suited them well. They seemed to have no regrets about moving to the tumbleweed capital of America.

“Hey guys, how is Pico?” Celia called, walking up to the long silver trailer that she shared with her parents. It sat tucked away behind ragged bushes about two hundred meters from the store.

“Pico has had quite the day. Your mother gave him a bath and brushed his neck for over thirty minutes,” her father, Miguel, drolly replied from under the shade of the trailer’s awning. He was clutching a well-loved copy of Moby Dick.

“That’s a bigger day than I had,” Celia laughed, flopping down into a lawn chair beside her father. She waited for him to hand her a cold beer from the cooler by his feet.

“Shush you two, I don’t want to hear any fussing about Pico tonight,” her mother, Maria, called from inside the trailer.

Her mother was no doubt inside working on one of her paintings. They were lovely renditions of countryside cottages, complete with little gardens and happy plumes of smoke rising from the chimneys. Each one was basically the same, except Maria always made sure to change up the type of flowers in the garden. It would have been a wonderful hobby for some dotty old lady in an English village, but the lush vegetation of the picture looked too green and too overdone when compared to the barren outside world. Celia had never seen lush countryside like her mother painted, but it looked so crowded and dense with life that it made her feel a little claustrophobic.

“You know, you guys should retire to somewhere nicer,” Celia said, for at least the fifth time that month. “Maybe to the beach.”

“Why? We like it here. It is everything we want,” Miguel said, not looking up from his book. “We have beautiful sunsets, peace and quiet, and plenty of fresh air.”

With glasses perched on his nose, and a hand wrapped around a cigar, he looked the part of an English professor at some East Coast school. Celia once again tried to imagine what had made her nice, normal parents decide that living in Viento Frio was a good life choice. Even after they had seen the place in all its terrible glory they had decided to stay! They had driven out to the middle of nowhere, looked at each other, and decided it was a completely rational idea to stay and pretend they still lived normal lives. Over twenty years later, the town was still only known for the size of its scorpions and the amount of meth that got shipped through. Yet Miguel and Maria continued to live there without a second thought.

Celia sighed and slumped back in her chair. The sunset was coming, which was always worth watching; her father had a point there. Without any trees to block the view, the swirling colors seemed endlessly intense in the vast sky. The pinks and purples danced for miles and miles into the horizon making a light show that never failed to amaze Celia, even all these years later. She had been to Disneyland once, where fireworks attempted to light up a sky filled with city lights and smog. The desert’s beauty washed over her and dazzled like those fireworks had failed to do so.

“Did you guys come for the sunsets?” she whispered some time later as the final colors melted away, leaving the dusty denim blue of evening behind.

The corner of Miguel’s mouth twitched, but a full smile didn’t manage to slip out. Celia endlessly bemoaned the fate of having grown up a ‘desert rat’, but she had a love for the same rocky hills that she claimed to hate. Miguel most likely knew that. Her conflicted emotions for their hot, dusty town had been fought over endless times when she was an angry teenager, but was a source of mere amusement for him now, it seemed.

Maria finally came out of the house. She had a paintbrush behind her ear and a big plate of sandwiches in her hands. “I thought we’d eat something easy and cold tonight, with the heat being what it is,” she said cheerfully.

Celia eagerly grabbed a turkey sandwich from the top of the stack. Her mother found any excuse to not cook, and they had sandwiches at least three times a week. Luckily, the sandwiches were delicious, and it was hard to complain. How her mother managed to make filling meals from canned meat, Celia would never understand.

“Mija, your father and I did want to talk with you tonight about something,” Maria said softly as she settled into a chair next to Celia, shooting a quick look at Miguel.

Miguel cleared his throat and leaned forward in his chair, finally putting down his book. Celia chewed slowly as she looked from her mother to her father trying to figure out what was coming next. She was not a fan of surprises, especially ones that came after a dramatic throat clearing.

“Have you given any thought to what you want to do next?” Miguel started, looking intently as Celia.

“Next? This week? I thought I’d get the store ready for Christmas. Can never start too early preparing for the holiday rush.”

“We’re serious, Celia,” Maria sighed.

Miguel tried again. “We are talking about your future. We know you didn’t want to start college right after school, and we’ve tried to give you some time to figure things out. But we don’t think you want to stay here and work in the store forever. You are twenty and have a whole world of opportunities out there.”

“Why shouldn’t I stay? We need the store and someone to run it!” Celia said defensively, putting down her sandwich because it suddenly tasted very bitter.

“Your mother and I don’t need the store. Our retirement is just fine without it. The town probably needs the store, but we can always find someone else to run it. What you need, though, is to get out there and explore. This was a wonderful place to raise a child, but we think you should also go out and find your own adventures.”

Celia was going to argue that Viento Frio was, in fact, not a wonderful place to raise a child, but thought better of it. She simply glowered at her parents. They had decided to raise her so far from other cities that she felt out of place anywhere except in the desert. She was made from shifting sands, and always would be. The last thing she wanted to do was to try to go to Los Angeles and be a laughing stock since the only people she could relate to were old wrinkly bikers. She had been the only kid in her high school class! It was not like she had the social skills and training to make it in the wider world.

Even if she did leave, she had no idea what she would do out there in the big world. The idea of trying to leave frightened her…and not much managed to do that.

“I don’t have anywhere I really want to go. Besides, I can’t just leave you guys here! What if something happened?”

“We are in our fifties, not our eighties, Sweetie,” Maria broke in, her tone clipped and dangerous. “No matter what you may think, we can take care of ourselves. We are happily retired here and would love for you to come back and visit. But we’d like you to think about where you want to end up. It doesn’t have to be here.”

“Yes it does,” Celia said sullenly, getting up from the table and going to enter the trailer. “There is nowhere else for a girl like me.”