Neva, the story’s narrator, states that she grew up in Saguarita, Colorado. She shared an adobe home with her grandmother and mother—no men. She describes her grandmother as “a small shadowy woman […] [who] kept an herb garden in the backyard, hung her laundry on metal cords, and occasionally snapped the necks of chickens with an elegant flick of the wrist” (163). Her grandmother would often proclaim, “I’m too damn old to still be raising children” (163)—and she was never referring to Neva, but to Neva’s mother, Desiree Leticia Cordova.

Desiree is unstable, and has struggled with substance abuse her whole life. During her twenties, she worked as a dancer at a strip club. Neva writes, “In her thirties, the small portion of them she got to live, she uprooted us to California during one of her ecstatic breaks from perpetual sadness. These breaks were infrequent but potent and gave my mother the strength of ten women who require no sleep and live for their whims” (164).

When Neva was 12, her mother abruptly announced that she was beginning plans to get herself and Neva out of their “dump” of a town and move them to “San Diego, with all that sunshine” (164).