Valentine

As the novel opens, Gloria Ramírez is near an oil field outside Odessa, Texas, on a Sunday morning after Valentine’s Day. She struggles to depart from a pickup truck without waking the young man asleep, perhaps passed out, inside. She drove off with him last night at the Sonic in Odessa, but now “[t]he sight of him is a torment and she wishes again that his death will come soon, that it will be vicious and lonely, with nobody to grieve for him” (1). He assaulted her and then tried to strangle her until he passed out. Even after the sun comes up, the girl is unsure where she is: “She imagines her limbs disconnected, fleeing into the desert to be picked clean by coyotes” (4). She sees a ranch on the horizon. She’s unsure of the distance or who lives there, but she can’t stay by the pickup. Determined to walk to the farmhouse, she tries to gather her clothes—except for her shoes, which she cannot find. She crosses abandoned drill sites and even crawls through barbed wire and fends off a rogue coyote. “She is surprised by her strength, surprised she is still moving” (8).