In Mexico the heat wakes you up in the morning, lulls you back to sleep in the afternoon, and torments you all night. That’s why the tent is a sauna shot through with dawn, lighting up the multicolored fabric panels in a rainbow of hot misery. I’m a soggy spreadeagled lump on a mattress pad that’s slimy with pooling sweat. Next to me Nooshin is half-curled on her side, tendrils of damp inky hair spilling everywhere, a sweat-darkened spaghetti tanktop riding up on her belly. The empty water bottles are stacked in a small pyramid nearby.

Through the tent’s mesh door is a sliver of church courtyard — crumbling stone wall, an overgrown Russian olive tree, what used to be a garden but is now just straggly weeds. I unzip the door and stumble out into the morning, wearing just a pair of jeans. The angry pink sun immediately heats up my bald spot and bare shoulders. I glance around, using the old whitewashed Catholic church to orient myself. The truck is right where I left it, parked just inside the closed gate and invisible from the road. On the other side of the small courtyard is a padlocked rectory and a pump with a frozen pumphandle. This parish hasn’t had a priest in decades.

I need to piss, but I can’t go far. The rocky ground is slicing at the tender soles of my feet. I manage a couple hobbling steps, then unzip and aim away from the tent.

“Camping is more fun when you don’t have to camp,” Nooshin sighs behind me.

“Better than sleeping in the truck,” I point out, shaking once…twice…three times.

Her laugh is a wan sound.

“What?” I ask, zipping up my jeans.

“You, that’s what. You always find the upside, even if it’s only not the downside. Or whatever I’m trying to say.” I can hear a long exhalation, probably Nooshin trying to blow the bangs out of her face. “I’m so hot I can’t even think. You done out there?”

I turn around gingerly. “Yeah, I’m done. Wear your flip-flops. This ground is hell on bare feet.”

She straightens up too quickly coming through the tent flap. It catches on the backside of her track pants, pulling them down her skinny thighs in a fabric tangle. Losing her balance she flails wildly, catching herself, teetering, then falling again — until I grab a scrawny arm and yank her upright.

Pulling her track pants back up again, Nooshin considers her pregnant tummy in dismay. “This baby is really starting to mess with my balance.”

“You need to go to the bathroom?” I ask, preparing to recommend a spot where she can brace herself against the courtyard wall.

“I need fresh air. And breakfast. I’m starving.”

“We’ve still got green peppers,” I grin.

Her delicate features screw into a blech! “That was yesterday. Today they make me want to throw up.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get breakfast in Mexico City. It’s just over those mountains, about a half-hour away.” I point at the weathered humps that fringe the Valle de Mexico — Valley of Mexico — a giant shithole of 25 million people covered with a lid of smog.

Nooshin is pinning limp and tangly hair behind her ears. “Any chance I’ll get a shower first?”

“A sink shower at a gas station, maybe.”

She lifts her bony shoulders in a shrug. Good enough. I’m reminded of her vast adaptability — plunging into a foreign country where she barely speaks the language, discovering she’s pregnant, going days without a real bed or a shower. And to think I’ve had girlfriends who wouldn’t even leave their apartments without makeup. But those girlfriends were nothing like Nooshin. They didn’t come to America as a little immigrant girl, or grow up skyscraper-shaped with a lazy eye, or leave an arranged marriage with a controlling Muslim asshole.

A gust of hot wind blows away Nooshin’s bangs, revealing the multitude of tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and down her nose. For a moment her mocha-dark eyes don’t betray the cause — then the right orb drifts away, more interested in the Russian olive behind me. My heart thumps with adoration. I want to fold her perfect imperfections into my arms and kiss her until the sun transits back into night. But my breath could probably kill, so I settle for the hugging part instead.

She tries to nuzzle into my shoulder, but the baby is complicating our clinch. Finally she twists her hips to the side, aiming her belly away from mine, and we bake sweatily in each other’s arms.

After a while I break away. “The sooner we get packed up, the sooner we’ll get to Mexico City.” I crawl into the tent and began passing stuff out to her — mattress pads, some stray clothes, the pyramid of empty water bottles.

“Do you think you’re ready to talk about a name?” Nooshin asks tentatively, in between trips to the Explorer.

“A name?” I’m remembering my spyjob on her secret notebook and the baby names scribbled hopefully inside it. “Sure. Do you have any names you like? Come on, you go first.”

Her face lights up like a Roman candle. She’s been waiting to have this conversation since before the pregnancy test. “Do you like the name Finn?”

“Finn?”

“Yeah. With two n’s.”

“Nah, not really.” I scramble out of the tent, handing her the last item — a bottle of cheap cologne she’s been using to mask her body odor. “You don’t think I’m Finnish, do you? Because I’m not. I’m a mutt. German and Swedish and Dutch.”

She pours cologne into her palm and splashes it on herself, first one underarm, then the other. “Okay…what about Iraj?”

“Nah. Too much like Iraq.”

That’s worth a reprimanding glance. “They’re nothing alike if you speak Farsi.”

“Which I don’t,” I remind her, squatting to pull the tent stakes.

In my peripheral vision I watch her shadow pour another palmful of cologne, then dip into the front of her tracksuit. “Simon?”

“Like the American Idol limey with all the putdowns? No way.”

“Namdar?”

“Wasn’t that an alien species in the Star Trek metaverse?”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m being totally serious here. The Namdar. I could swear — ”

“Nick Jr.” She’s standing hands on hips and looking annoyed.

“Well, I have to admit it has a certain egocentric appeal.” I grin playfully, testing Nooshin’s reaction, just in case her sense of humor is vanishing in a hormonal mood swing. “Too bad it’s a cable TV network.”

“What?”

“You know, Nickelodeon Junior. The kids’ network on cable TV?”

“Oh. Right.” The bottle of cologne tumbles around and around in her writhing hands. “I remember my niece and nephew watching it. Especially Saturday mornings. Nasrin would sleep in and Farid would let the kids do whatever they wanted.”

The past tense of her remembrance is piercing. Being cast out of her family is a harsh, fresh wound. The familial severance I would’ve welcomed is killing her. Maybe literally, if all this bullshit about honor killings is true.

“Hey,” I say gently, pausing with the tent half-collapsed. “We’ve got five months to pick a name, you know.”

That’s a happier topic. Nooshin lifts her chin and fixes on me with a hopeful expression, looking ahead now, not back. “Yeah, 5 months. Plenty of time…” Her flip-flops scrape on the ground, turning inward shyly. “What about…Afshar?” The name hangs like a sparkle between us.

Instantly I know it’s her favorite. I squint into the beveled morning, taking in her nervous pose, silent and frail as a cattail…except for that incongruous belly, sticking out between her tanktop and track pants in a caramel bulge. Then somehow — don’t ask me how — I understand why it’s her favorite. Afshar was her grandfather’s name.

I only know her grandfather as a faded picture in her backpack, a stubble-jawed man with kind eyes. She once described him as a simple Iranian farmer buffeted by the overwhelming strangeness of America, trying to hold their family together across hemispheres, doting on her the way nobody else did. A memory trace fires and I hear her voice breaking into sobs again — my grandfather always said that God made me this way, that I’m perfect just the way I am…

“Afshar,” I nod in approval. “Now there’s a name I like.”