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Just after sunrise, silence was the first wave and then the sounds of birds and small rustles in the trees and bushes that surrounded the Casita. I absorbed the slow unfolding of the morning, standing on my front steps, the air chilled by the desert night, colors that didn’t exist in Dallas, the lilac of the distant mountains, the ochre tones of the closer hills, an explosion of clouds, the sun pushing through, drenching the landscape, sweeping back the moon and stars, nature in all its bossy glory, I had forgotten how to breathe. 

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I had been living in Dallas for six months when one of my old boyfriends, a bad boyfriend but someone who always made me laugh and had been in my life when my first novel was published, contacted me to meet for lunch since he was coming to Texas. He had been in Israel when I met Kevin, and by the time he returned to New York, I was engaged, pregnant, and soon to move to London. I wanted to see someone who knew me back in New York when I was thin, single, and possibly cool. Now, I was none of those things, living in suburbia with my wonderful, albeit demanding baby and my busy, mostly silent husband. I lived in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac with largely invisible neighbors, except the boy across the street who spent most of his time waving at anyone or anything (squirrels, cars, dogs) passing his porch.

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I had a list of observations about Dallas: It was incredibly hot, no one walked, the architecture was a mixture of Versailles, Victorian, and Hollywood excess, the women all had blowouts, wore tons of makeup even at breakfast and had perfectly manicured nails unless they were dressed as maids, while the men were costumed as cowboy executives, used sports analogies and drove around in construction vehicles that were spotlessly clean and had no connection to how they earned money. The highways merged without warning; there was nothing to do, nowhere to go; it was freezing cold because of the air-conditioning and blazingly hot.

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