Another bright oven-hot day in Mexico, the kind we survive with sunglasses and the Explorer’s windows rolled down. Empty plastic water bottles are piled up to my ankles because I refuse to toss them out the window, the common Mexican practice that fills ditches with litter. We’re somewhere on the outskirts of Puebla, a heavily-industrialized colonial city that sprawls across the altiplano in a grimy smear. On either side of the highway are factories peeling away in huge complexes topped with smokestacks and water towers. The corporate logos are a litany of jobs lost in America and gained here — 3M, Alcoa, IBM, Whirlpool, DuPont. Dominating all of the factory complexes is the humongous Volkswagen plant, which produces every last Jetta in the world. Nick chortles as we parallel its chainlink fringe. The Volkswagen parking lot is filled bumper-to-bumper with Fords, mostly.

For a while it seems like the factories will never end…until suddenly they do, and we plunge into suburbia. I feel like I’m back home in Tijuana. The blocks are dusty and crammed with cement-block homes. Store windows advertise all the same merchandise you can buy at an American mall, only with prices in pesos. Schoolyards and parks are the occasional oasis, almost lost in the traffic and earth tones, a verdant fantasy in my peripheral vision.

When a police car tailgates us with lightbar flashing, Nick pulls over in a storm of curses. Time for another mordida — literally “little bite” — which is the polite way of saying bribe. He prepares to pay from our dwindling handful of cash, but the cop just checks our tourist visas. For once the smudged papers are a ward against corruption. Afterward we crest a hilly road with a view of the horizon, lumpy with volcanoes like Popocatepetl, smoldering into the cyanide-blue sky.

A Gigante sign towers over the rooftops. With unusual patience Nick waits for a healthy gap in the traffic, left blinker click-click-clicking. We pull into a black ocean of asphalt gridded with parking spaces. Only half a dozen cars are actually parked at the supermarket, all of them right by the entrance.

“Let’s go over there,” I say, pointing to an isolated spot in the middle, 100 yards from the nearest car. Nick turns the wheel obediently, grinning like a fiend. It’s a pickup line and he knows it. The truck is barely in park before I’m straddling him, my sundress hiked up and hiphuggers pulled aside, the steering wheel rubbing into my back. Puebla? Just a place we had a quickie.

He’s tortured, panting, hostile with his hips — but not on the brink of release. I grind even harder into his choppy thrusts, my arms wrapped around his neck, talking dirty in my abandon the way he likes. Suddenly my vision is exploding into stars, his sloppy kisses smothering me until I can’t breathe, and I was never so happy to drown…

When I open my eyes again, Nick is wearing an uncomfortable look. “What’s the matter?” I ask in a small panic, wondering if we’ve been spotted.

He glances down at my swelling belly, which sits like a lump between us. “I keep thinking…” A bead of sweat trickles down from his bald spot and disappears behind an ear. He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“What?” I can feel him softening inside me. “What is it?”

Nick’s icy blue gaze is roaming the empty parking lot around us. He laughs desperately. “I keep thinking…the baby can see us.”

An overwhelming feeling of tenderness floods through me. “You know what the book says,” I say gently, citing our Qu’ran — What To Expect When You’re Expecting. “The baby just feels it like a gentle rocking — ”

“I know what the book says.” His shoulders bunch, lifting me off him and back into the passenger seat with barely a grimace of exertion. “But I still keep thinking it.”

“Do you, um, want me to…” Descending from orgasm I’m back to being shy again. I bite my lip and murmur, “Do you want a…blowjob? Would that be better?”

Nick’s answer — he tugs his jeans back over his hips, buttons them, and zips the fly.

Now it’s my turn to contemplate my swelling belly, not very big yet, but already popping the seams on my sundress. A sigh lifts my still-flat chest. Maternity clothes. I need to buy my first maternity clothes. “It’s only going to get worse,” I think aloud, picturing him coupled with a big pregnant beachball.

He pauses halfway out his door. Past him the Gigante supermercado is countless empty rows and several lightpoles away. “You craving anything?”

“Not anymore,” I grin shyly, still tingling with afterglow.

A brusque smile. “Besides that.”

“Green peppers!” I blurt, surprising myself. Where did that come from? But suddenly I want them more than anything in the world. “Green bell peppers. Just…raw. I just, you know…”

Nick is already receding across the parking lot, a tall silhouette with an abbreviated grocery list in his head. Heatwaves boil up around his long strides. I watch the glassy doors snap open and snap shut, swallowing him into air-conditioning and colorful shelves of food. Then I take out my dog-eared notebook and favorite swirly purple pen and scribble this poem:

THERE’S NO TURNING BACK NOWDon’t ask how I got pregnant
in a third world country
with condom foils littering the floor
23 years and 0 college degrees
and not even divorced yet.

Nick stepped out of an Old Navy ad
and into my life
the chatty gringo at home
on Avenida Revolucion
and almost taller than me.
Hard to believe — that was only
last November.

Love at first sight? Maybe…
on a day in a marriage where love
was an afterthought.
If Grandfather was alive he would say
Nick and I
did not meet by accident.

I don’t pretend to understand him
a baffling gender in microcosm
– and worse, American –
slaving for perfectibility and mere things.
But he says we’re not going to leave each other
not in forever
and I like the sound of that.

Now my belly is rounding
with our baby boy
and Nick’s favorite bumps, well…
they’re still just bumps
with aspirations.
I may never buy a maternity bra.

Whenever he goes away
he takes the sun in his eyes
and leaves me in longing darkness
a heart in this passenger seat
beating for him.