Just when you think Mexico can’t get any worse, it does.

Tecate may seem like a shallow valley filled with grit and bleakness and not much else — but it’s heaven on earth compared to Mexicali, a sprawling border city with “all of Tijuana’s harms and none of its charms” as Nick says. I close my eyes to the endless slum-covered hills, and dirty kids playing in garbage heaps, and disemboweled vehicles rusting where they died. Instead I try to focus on something else. Anything else. The way our cellphones are in a dead spot where my family can’t call. The sweaty clinch that joins Nick and I across the Explorer’s cab, my fingers entwined in his. The punkish beats of Les Savy Fav wailing from the speakers:

you’re born and you’re red
you’re dead and you’re blue
you’re green at 19 and gray at 22

Past the sadness of Mexicali is Mexican Highway 2, a laserbeam of asphalt cutting across 120 miles of high desert, paralleling the border fence that divides Arizona and Sonora. Nick explains that a widening project has transformed last century’s two-lane parking lot into this century’s four-lane speedway. He hangs in the left lane and tailgates fiercely, forcing aside everything from motorcycles to semi-trailers. I stare out the dusty windshield at a desolate landscape rushing past. The barren sand is dotted with the odd towering shapes of saguaro, and creosote bushes with leaves so waxy they shine in the fading afternoon light, and the delicate teetering thrusts of agave spikes.

In the middle of nowhere is the small border town of Sonoita, just a glorified wayside rest. Nick pulls into a neon-trimmed Pemex station to tank up the Explorer, a bottomless pit for fossil fuels. The pay-at-the-pump islands are surprisingly far apart. The spacing mystery baffles me — until a semitrailer-sized RV waddles in, almost blotting out the sun. It disgorges American retirees on their way to the postcard beaches that line the Sea of Cortez. Then the mystery of the wide-apart pumps becomes a single self-incriminating “Duh!”

For dinner Nick drives across the intersection to McDonald’s. This version is a carbon copy of the Golden Arches where we used to rendezvous, back in the unhappy San Diego days when I’d sneak out of Nasrin’s townhome to meet him. We idle in the drive-thru lane with trailer homes and SUVs and big-wheeled pickups, most with American license plates. And we idle some more. Service is so slow that he finally puts the truck in park and kills the ignition to save gas.

“It’d probably be faster if we went inside,” I suggest helpfully. “What do you think?”

“I think I’ve got a better idea.” Suddenly he leans across the cab, nuzzling into me, his lips silky and teasing on my neck — then parting into exquisite little bites, right where the skin slopes into my shoulder. Saman never discovered that vulnerable melty spot in five years of marriage, a spot I didn’t even know I had. Nick found it the first night we slept together.

I puddle into him, my eyelids fluttering. “Oh god. You have to stop…” I turn into his delicious torture, seeking his mouth, gasping. “You know I can’t take this…”

“I’ve always wanted to get to second base in a McDonald’s drive-thru,” he murmurs into my kiss, and slides a palm underneath my tanktop.

I freeze solid. “Nick!” My gaze ricochets around the drive-thru and parking lot and McDonald’s windows. “People will see us!”

Laughter fills the cab as he pulls away, smirking playfully. Then his gaze falls to my chest, a skintight lime green smoothness interrupted by my disappointed nipples. His features seem to turn inward, aligning into introspection.

“What?” I ask worriedly, folding my arms across the contrasting lemon yellow OLD NAVY logo on my tanktop. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” The line in front of us eases forward, prompting him to restart the Explorer. Les Savy Fav begins bombarding our eardrums again.

“Nick…”

His smile is brittle. “I can’t keep my hands off you.”

“Yeah?” I blush into my lap. “What’s wrong with that?”

Nick doesn’t answer, a pause that elongates around us. I study his jeaned knees intently. The left one is jackhammering with typical impatience. A raw voice swells around us:

I’d trade my eyes for satellites
I’d trade my hands for iron clamps
I’d trade my lungs for vacuum pumps

I find myself wondering if I’d ever trade these bumps for implants. To keep Nick? Yeah, in a heartbeat. He claims to love my bumps, but I’m not stupid. Breasts are everything to men. I know that with the acuity of a girl who’s never had any.

His knee lifts, taking a hiking boot off the brake, easing the Explorer alongside the menu sign with the embedded two-way speaker. “You want cajitas felices so we can get the toys? Those weird anamorphic characters from that Mexican kids’ cartoon?”

“Cajitas felices?” I ask in miserable stupidity.

The glint is back in his icy blue eyes. “Happy Meals.”

“Oh. Right! Sure, I’ll have a Happy Meal. A hamburger one.”

After we finally get to the pickup window, Nick tosses a greasy bag into my lap and steers onto Mexican Highway 8, which angles southwest toward what he describes as the “seaside idyll” of Puerto Penasco. His plan is to camp on the beach tonight, which is totally illegal but oh well. With Sonoita in our rearview mirror the truck shudders with speed. The windows fill with another unforgiving vista of open desert. Les Savy Fav dies into silence, quickly replaced by The Chemical Brothers.

I bite into my hamburger and stare at it intensely, as if half a fried patty could answer the question I’m about to ask. “Do you think it’s weird that we talk about everything except religion?”

“Oh, I don’t know…” Nick evades reflexively, popping a french fry into his mouth. “Why do you ask?”

“Remember when we stayed with Juan in Tecate? I talked more religion in one day with his nephew Tommy than in three months with you.”

“Really? We’ve known each other for that long?” He chuckles in slippery disbelief. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve known you — ”

“I’m not letting you change the subject.”

Nick chuckles again, and pops another french fry into his mouth. “Look, I just figure you must not be religious. You don’t attend a mosque, and I’ve never seen you saying your daily prayers, or whatever it’s called when you pray to Mecca seven times a day.”

I roll my eyes, hoping the gesture doesn’t strand my wandering eyeball in a weird position. “Muslims don’t pray to Mecca. Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca.”

“Except you don’t pray at all.”

“No,” I admit a little sadly. “I don’t.”

In my peripheral vision Nick is rooting through his McDonald’s bag for more fries. “But you’re still a Muslim, right? Your whole family?”

“Yeah. Me, my family, we’re all Muslims.” My head is a blizzard of conflicting thoughts. I want to tell him everything, all at once. But I force myself to slow down. “How much do you know about Iranian history?”

“Well, I did some googling after I met you, and browsed the topical literature in the UCLA library. So I know there was a significant outmigration of Westernized and secular Iranians after the Revolution, when the Shah was overthrown and Khomeini came to power.”

I’m so flattered that he researched Iran — researched me — that I have to nod for a while before my voice comes back. “Yeah, that’s when a lot of Saman’s family left. They lost their businesses and property in the Revolution. Everything but their lives, really.” I feel a pang of sympathy for the man who’s still my husband, for the people who are still my in-laws. “They could’ve been jailed or even killed if they stayed, you know?”

Nick overtakes a boat-towing RV like it’s standing still. “But your family didn’t leave then?”

“I think my parents welcomed the Revolution.” I take another bite of hamburger, trying to ignore the speedometer and its needle buried at 85 MPH. “I get the impression they were pretty religious back then. Not much different than the students who took over the U.S. Embassy and held the hostages.”

“So when did you guys actually immigrate to America?”

“At the end of the Iran-Iraq War. My parents don’t talk about it — they don’t talk about anything with me, really — but Nasrin, she’s old enough to remember the fights they had with our relatives. She says Mom and Dad were disillusioned by the way everything had gone so wrong. Like, teenage boys being conscripted into the army and sent to fight in the war. 12 and 13-year-old boys.” I gulp the last of my hamburger, replaying memories on a movie screen in my mind. All the figures are tall and looming, the angles strangely tilted. I’m a kid looking up at adult faces, hanging on every expression. “In America they wanted us to be good Muslims at first, especially…especially when…”

“What?” Nick reaches over and gives my bare thigh a squeeze. “You okay? Nooshin?”

I’m pawing away sudden hot tears. “I was just thinking about my grandfather. I wish you could’ve met him. He was a farmer, just like you. He’s the one person in my family who could appreciate you.” I take a deep shuddering breath, the kind that makes everything inside hurt even worse. “He always said that God made me this way, that I’m perfect just the way I am. He was the only one. My aunts and parents and even Nasrin, they never said that to me, they never, they…”

Nick dips into his McDonald’s bag for a napkin and hands it to me. His scowl is a strapped-down thing. After a while he asks, “Everything changed after your grandpa died, huh?”

“Yeah.” The word is lost in the thumping beats. I try again, louder this time. “Yeah. He was kinda like this anchor connecting us to Iran, and without him we were all just…adrift. I don’t know how to explain it, really. My parents didn’t talk to me much anymore, not even in Farsi, and they even cut themselves off from each other. Dad, he worked about a million hours a week, and Mom just retreated into a shell. So I kinda grew up nothing at all.”

“Do you believe in God?” Nick asks staring straight ahead, veering around a lackadaisical Mexican station wagon. “Or Allah? Or…?”

“I believe in a higher power. I don’t think it really matters what we call him or her. What about you?”

“I don’t.”

The finality of his statement is a little stunning. “No?” I say eventually. “You don’t believe in a higher power or God or anything?”

“Maybe for other people. But not for me.”

I almost giggle when he puts it that way. How typical of him, really. Nick doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in contrariness. “So you didn’t go to church when you were growing up?”

“Sure I did. I was raised Lutheran. Missouri Synod.”

“What’s that?”

“The Dark Side of Protestantism. Women aren’t allowed to be pastors. That kind of shit.” Nick laughs harshly. “Struggle to reform Christianity for 500 years — and wind up in bed with the Pope. What the fuck would Martin Luther say?”

“Martin Luther…King Jr.?” I ask hopefully.

His voice goes flat. “You don’t know who Martin Luther is.”

“Well, um…not really.”

“Nooshin.”

“Yeah?” I answer trepidatiously.

“The Reformation. The Protestant Reformation. Ever hear of it?”

“Actually…no.” Panicked by my apparent stupidity, I rush to add, “But I haven’t gone to college. That’s something from a college or university class, right?”

For a long paralyzing moment Nick seems ready to lean over and open my door and kick me out — but then he grins. “That’s America for you.” His grin splits even wider. “Fucking A.”

I don’t know whether he’s swearing at my ignorance — or the line of hills which suddenly appear on the horizon, leaping closer with every eyeblink, and the road curving sharply into them, and omigod we’re going to DIE, there’s no way he can –

Nick hits the brakes hard enough to hurl me into my seatbelt, forward and then sideways, briefly yanking the steering wheel, catching the curve at terrifying speed, tires squealing. How the Explorer doesn’t roll over — over and over, becoming a flaming twisted ball of metal bouncing up the hillside — I will never know.

My chest is heaving so hard I can barely talk. “Can you…slow down…maybe?” I watch the speedometer needle pause and fall, back into speeds that make the desert vista resolve into details, instead of just a blurring earthtone rush.

“Sorry about that,” he says after a while. One-and-a-half Chemical Brothers remixes later, to be exact. But his profile was already softening with remorse. He slides a palm across the front seat toward me. The knee this time, instead of my thigh. I’m debating what to do about that deliberately apologetic touch — cover his hand with mine in forgiveness, or maybe ignore it to emphasize my dislike of near-death experiences — when the warmth vanishes. The hand is plundering my Happy Meal bag. “Well, if you don’t want your fries…”