This postage stamp of a house is shot through with sunbeams and dust particles when I emerge from the bathroom, putting away the improvised toilet plunger I built out of coathangers. Across the street a racing-striped minivan is engorging a family of Mexicans dressed in their Christmas best. They mill across their hardpan lawn, occasionally casting a curious glance at the royal blue Ford Explorer with Iowa plates, their new American neighbors. In the distance a churchbell is tolling the hour, one solemn gong. You might presume they’re headed for mass like good little papists, but I happen to know they converted to Mormonism a couple years ago, apparently in hopes of securing an interest-free loan to start an auto repair shop. The shit you learn from gossipy storekeepers.

“Hey Nooshin, come out here! I’ve got something to show you!” Then I catch myself and start laughing. “Well, not show you. It’s still kinda smelly in there. Just listen.” I lean into the bathroom and slap the toilet handle. Water rushes and gurgles and finally dies into leaky quiet.

The bedroom door opens a crack. Her right eye peeks at me, the dark iris slowly drifting away. “You fixed it?”

“Hell yeah. The toilet is officially working again!”

“Yaayyy.” The exclamation barely reaches my ears, it’s so unenthusiastic. The door closes again.

“You ready to go?”

“I still can’t decide what to wear.” Nooshin’s voice is a muffled groan of frustration. “God, maybe I should just stay here.”

“You can’t stay here.” I never figured her for the type of woman who obsesses over clothing, but apparently she does. “You’re coming with me, ready or not.”

Hinges creak behind me. “How does this look?”

Nooshin is frowning down at her floral-print shirtdress, a pattern of sunflowers on a soft yellow background. The top three buttons are open, revealing her sharp clavicles and the white scoop of a tanktop underneath. I follow the line of buttons to a shirttail hem, then bony knees and thin calves and and finally a pair of brown lug-soled boots that make her even taller than me. The effect is ruggedly delicate, if that makes any sense.

“What do you think?” she asks, raising her gaze shyly. “Be honest.”

“I liked you better with that big bandage-thing on your nose.”

“Nick. No making me crazy. I need you to tell me what you really think.”

“I think you should stop fishing for compliments and get your ass in the truck already.” I refuse to believe a girl can be this fucking clueless that she’s beautiful.

Driving around Colonia Aviacion, I toss her an oversized map of Tijuana and give her a crash course in the vitals of navigation. How she can fix her position by triangulating from local landmarks — the runty skyscrapers of downtown, antennae-studded Miraval Hill, dead towering smokestacks in the nearby industrial park. Where she can catch the express bus to the tourist district, or a reputable taxi. What roads to follow to the San Isidro and Otay Mesa border crossings.

“You mean…” Nooshin’s face tilts at me in excitement. “…I’ll get to drive your truck?”

“Not fucking likely. This is Mexico, last time I checked. But you’ll need to know a cab driver is taking you in the right direction.”

“Oh. Right.” She jots another note on the map spread across her lap.

Next I loop around General Abelardo L. Rodriguez International Airport, named after an interim president who died in corruptacular retirement in La Jolla, California. The airport looks more municipal than international, just a couple stubby runways lined with rusting aluminum hangars. The control tower is whitewashed and decorated with the next best thing to a Nativity display — a Nativity banner. Adjoining it is a single-story terminal about the size of a tour bus.

I slow down — unnaturally slow, for my lead foot — so we can watch jets scream over American airspace and scrape the border fence as they land. Nooshin is enthralled by the spectacle of gigantic aircraft shoehorning into the minuscule runways. Until she realizes we could die a horrible flaming death if a 747 trips over the fence and pancakes into our house.

Back in our neighborhood I cruise the asphalt streets first, then the gravel ones, pointing through the dirty windshield at places she is — and isn’t — allowed to go. When she asks, I readily admit the distinction is arbitrary. I’ve already made the rounds of these places, introducing myself to shopkeepers and clerks and waitrons, feeling them out. If I got the wrong vibe, any sense that they might try to take advantage of Nooshin’s unfamiliarity with the language and culture and currency, then wham — I put them on my blacklist.

I’m worried her reaction will be hostile, bristling with resentment at being told what to do and what not to do. God knows my female colleagues at UCLA would scream bloody murder — even if they’d never been south of Beverly Hills, let alone south of the border. But Nooshin just blinks in surprise, glancing around at the storefronts and open-air stalls and sidewalk vendors selling crap out of carts. “You talked to all of them? Thinking of me?”

“Well, uh…yeah. Partly thinking of you, at least.”

Nooshin aims a lopsided grin across the cab at me. Beside the still-purplish bridge of her nose those dark eyes are narrowing — in appraisal, in validation, in something like amusement — and I get the eerie sensation that she’s reading me like a comic book.

“And here we finally are,” I announce, executing a sharp pedestrian-scattering turn into the parking lot of Wal-Mart, the new consumer epicenter of Colonia Aviacion and anchor tenant for an attached stripmall of glassy American-style stores.

There’s an explosion in the passenger seat. “Nick, look — it’s a Wal-Mart! I didn’t know they had Wal-Marts here. And over there, that store must be, like, the Mexican version of Old Navy, and — hey, is that a video store?” She whirls around and grabs my right bicep in both hands, squeezing my arm in excitement. “It is! We can rent videos, Nick! Videos!” A rueful laugh. “Now all we need is electricity.”

“This is the one place in our neighborhood where you’ll be okay at any store. They’ll give you the right change, and they take plastic too. But best of all…” I extricate my arm from her grasp and use it to point due east, out Nooshin’s window at a receding avenue. “Two blocks that way is our house. You can walk here anytime you want. During daylight, of course.”

“Of course,” she echoes happily, too distracted to gripe about the no-Nooshin-at-night rule. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go check it out!” And she slides out of the Explorer, bubbly with delight, an unrecognizable version of the girl who showed up at my place on Noche Buena.

I trail after Nooshin’s billowing shirtdress, admiring the flashes of thigh whenever the wind catches it right. I assume her cheerfulness is due to the prospect of shopping, that familiar and reassuring chick-ritual. But then she glances over a sunflower-patterned shoulder at me and halts, a hand outstretched to hold mine — “Nick, come on!” — and time seems to stop for a moment, until she catches herself reaching and hurriedly uses the hand to pin back her bangs, whirling like a storm cloud around her shy embarrassed smile.