They told me when I moved here the name of the place means "fat cottonwood trees". I come from back East, so the concept of "fat" as regards trees was a world apart from these, but you have to take somebody's word for something eventually or you'll never get anything done.
        My name is Karison Moab. I know — it sounds real funny. I was the last of four kids, all girls. Pop saved the name "Garrison" for when he finally got a boy on Mom, but she said I was the last try so they compromised. It's okay — I just tell people my name is Karrie and that's done.
        I work in a place called Sunset Acres Retirement Resort. It's a big dormitory where I wipe shit off old people forty-five hours a week, but you know the drill. All retirement homes are pretty much the same underneath. If I had to rate this place one to ten, based on how I'd want to live if I was old, I guess I'd give it a seven-and-a-half, maybe eight. The owners won't pay for movie channels for the "clients" — we're not allowed to call them patients or inmates, which is what they really are — and once in a while they let an abusive jerk or a klepto slip through the hiring filters, but not often. Mostly, though, if my brain was starting to misfire and my body was wearing out, I wouldn't mind being there.
        I say that because I can't imagine being mean to old people. I see them as ancient orphans -- especially the old women. They're not beautiful outside anymore, nobody wants them. They're out of touch with the real world, their kids don't find them useful anymore or don't have time. So they pay people like me to wipe their asses and tell them it's some unimaginable date, like nineteen-ninety-nine, that World War II has been over for almost sixty years. Tell them Jimmy Stewart and Frank Sinatra are dead. Frankly those are harder for me than telling them their kids or spouses are gone — they cry harder over that. I guess it's because you borrow the people who share your home, but you own public figures.
        Sometimes I'm not sure I believe in anything. We all die — that's the only provable fact I've found in thirty-five years. I mean, we all do the usual human things, but don't they all really point toward dying? We call it "elimination" at the home. I think that sounds more like death than calling it "shit". We slowly eliminate all the matter that is us, until it's gone past the point it can run our brains, and then we die.
        I grew up in Lexington Kentucky. My dad was a welder, my mom was a family doctor's receptionist. We got by okay, I never needed anything. But they're both gone now, and the last time I left my beautiful desert to go back and visit my sister — Sarah, she's second-youngest — the greenery seemed obscene. I got a headache from not seeing the sky. Well, I mean not seeing it at a hundred and eighty degrees. Just goes to show you can get used to damn near anything.
        I got off the bus out here sixteen years ago now. Franklin — my ex, who was my high school sweetheart if you can call all that sweat and groping sweet — was stationed at Holloman in the Air Force. It was less than a mile from here, in fact. Nineteen, knocked-up, dumb as a bag of hammers. I have to say Alamogordo's the only good thing that came of all that.
        I never had the baby. I didn't even see a doctor until I'd been out here two weeks and started having pains, and then I found out the pregnancy was ectopic — that means the egg planted in my fallopian tube instead of my uterus. When the fetus grew, the tube ruptured. They said I almost died from peritonitis, and that the baby wasn't any bigger than a lima bean.
        I like to think it would have been a girl just to spite Pop. He was such an asshole about the whole thing, threatened to kick me out if Frank and I didn't get married. We wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything else, though, and we were as in love as you can be at nineteen.
        It kind of drained all the magic out of everything when I lost the baby. Frank started drinking, got a couple of DUIs and got kicked out of the service. The last I saw him, he was driving his eighty-one Ford pickup west on Route 70, going to California to look for work. I don't know if he ever got a job. That's been nearly fifteen years. I divorced him in absentia, for desertion.
        Left me with no job, no skills and no left tube. I feel like if I get knocked-up now, it's destiny. Or maybe immaculate conception — hell, I haven't had sex with a man in six months, and it was two years before that. I guess you can learn to live without damned near anything, too.
        So I have this little trailer out back of Alamogordo. I'm a few blocks off Indian Wells, pretty close to Sunset Acres. The sun shines like a diamond would sing if stones had voices. The old people love me more than Frank must have, to leave me here like he did, almost broke and probably sterile. Even if the old people forget me too, from day to day, at least they want to see my face. When I want, I can go back and visit Sarah and her kids.
        And late at night when I go out back and look up over my head, sometimes I still get that feeling everybody probably has when they're nineteen... that there's something sweet and deep waiting in your life yet to carry you away when you least expect.
        I feel that way without my youth, my beauty, without money or stuff. Just a quiet little trailer and a night like a big, black colander turned upside-down over the top of the desert. Just me.
        I guess you can learn to live with damned near anything.