Niki had been born two years after the fall of Saigon, twenty-three years after Eisenhower had agreed to fund and train South Vietnamese soldiers to fight the communists. Her parents were among the lucky few, the handful of South Vietnamese evacuated along with American citizens. John and Nancy Ky had become Americans and immigrated to New Orleans, traded in tradition and their Vietnamese names, the horrors of their lives in Tayninh and Saigon for citizenship and a small tobacco shop on Magazine Street. They had named their only child Nicolan Jeane, would have named the son her father had wished for Nicolas. Niki’s birth had left her mother bedridden for more than a month, and the doctors had warned that another pregnancy would very likely kill her.

Neither of Niki’s parents had ever made a habit of talking about their lives before New Orleans, had kept themselves apart from the city’s tight-knit Vietnamese community. Always seemed to struggle to answer any questions Niki asked about their lives before America in as few words as possible, as if bad memories, bad times, had ears and could be summoned like demons. There had been letters, exotic stamps and picture postcards from halfway around the world, messages from faceless relatives written in the mysterious, beautiful alphabet that she had never learned to read. Her mother had kept these someplace secret, or maybe she’d just thrown them away. Niki had treasured her rare glimpses of this correspondence, would sometimes hold an envelope to her nose and lips, hoping for some whiff or faint taste of a world that must have been so much more marvelous than their boxy white and avocado-green house in the Metairie suburbs.

And when she’d been ten, just a few days past her tenth birthday, there had been a terrible storm in the Gulf. The ghost of a hurricane that had died at sea, and she’d awakened in the night, or the morning before dawn, and her mother had been sitting at the foot of her bed. Niki had lain very still, listening to the rain battering the roof, the wind dragging itself across and through everything. The room smelled like the menthols her mother had smoked for years, and she’d watched the orange and glowing tip of the Salem, a marker for her mother’s dim silhouette.

“Are you listening, Niki?” she’d asked, “The sky is falling.”

Niki had listened, had heard nothing but the storm and a garbage can rattling noisily somewhere behind the house.

“No, Mother. It’s just a storm. It’s only rain and wind.”

“Yes,” her mother had replied. “Of course, Niki.”

Then the cigarette had glowed more intensely in the darkness, but she hadn’t heard her mother exhale over the roar and wail of the storm.

“When I was a girl,” her mother had said, “when I was only a little older than you, Niki, I saw the sky fall down to earth. I saw the stars fall down and burn the world. I saw children-”

And then lightning had flashed so bright and violent and her mother had seemed to wither in the electric white glare, hardly alive in her flannel housecoat and the lines on her face drawn like wounds. Off towards the river, the thunder had rumbled contentedly to itself, proud, throaty sound. And Niki had realized how tightly her mother was squeezing her leg through the covers.

“It’s okay, Mother,” Niki had whispered, had tried to sound like she believed what she was saying, but for the first time she could remember she’d been frightened of the night and one of the delta storms.

Her mother had said nothing else, had not moved from where she sat at the foot of the bed, and Niki had eventually drifted back into uneasy dreams, sleep so shallow that the sound of the thunder and the rain had come right through. The next morning, her mother had said nothing, had never brought it up, and Niki had known better. But afterwards, on very stormy nights, she’d lain awake, and sometimes she’d heard her mother moving around in the kitchen, restless sounds, or the scuff of her slippers on the hallway floor outside her door.

And years later, not long before she’d finally dropped out of high school, she’d heard a song by R.E.M. on the radio, “Fall On Me,” had bought the album even though she’d never particularly liked the band, and played that one track over and over again, thinking of her mother and that night and the storm. By that time, she’d read and seen enough to guess her mother’s nightmares, had understood enough of jellied gasoline and mortars and hauntings to glimpse the bright edges of that insomnia. Finally, maybe twenty or thirty times through the song, picking the lyrics from the lush and tangled weave of voice and music, she’d put the record away and never listened to it again.

If New Orleans had taught Niki Ky nothing else, it had taught her the respect due to ghosts, proper respect for pain so deep it transcended flesh and blood, and scarred time.

If her father had bad dreams, they’d never shown.

Niki sat alone in the service station’s lobby, part office, part convenience store, sat pinned beneath fluorescence glaring like noon sunshine on a hangover. The Thomas Pynchon novel she’d picked up at a secondhand bookstore before leaving Myrtle Beach lay open across her lap, its spine broken by the vicious way she tended to bend paperbacks double while she read. But she’d hardly glanced at the pages once in the last half hour, not since the tow truck had come back and deposited the Vega at one edge of the Texaco’s wide, empty parking lot.

The driver was a heavyset black man named Milo, his hair beginning to gray at the temples and his name stitched blue on his shirt. Milo had checked under the hood, shaken his head and wiped his hands with the same oily rag he’d used to clean the dipstick. His prognosis hadn’t been any better than Wendel Sayer’s, and worse, he’d brought up money.

“Exactly how much?” she’d asked cautiously, and Milo had shrugged and slammed the hood shut.

“Now, that all depends on whether you just got yourself a blown gasket or a cracked cylinder head, or if maybe it’s the engine block that’s cracked. If it’s just the head, we’re talkin’ five, maybe six hundred, but, if it’s the block, well-”

“Whoa,” Niki had said, one hand up to stop him. “Thanks, but I really don’t think I want to hear this right now.” Better to take the whole thing in one nasty dose later, when she’d know for sure just how bad things were.

Milo shrugged again.

“Hear it now or hear it later, it don’t make no difference to your pocketbook, and it sure don’t make no difference to me.”

Now Milo was sitting behind the counter, eating Fritos and watching Green Acres, Fred Ziffle and Arnold the Pig on a tiny black-and-white portable television. He chuckled softly to himself in time with the laugh track. Niki closed her book and slipped it back inside the gym bag. She was exhausted, every nerve scrubbed raw from the road, and her ass ached from sitting in the hard plastic chair. And it was pointless pretending her mind was on anything else but her dwindling cash reserves and the car.

And Danny. Always Danny, sooner or later.

She yawned, stretched her legs and arms, and felt the bloodless jab of pins and needles in her left foot. If she didn’t get some serious caffeine, and get it soon, she was gonna crash.

“Excuse me,” she said, and Milo, clearly annoyed and not ashamed to show it, looked glumly up at her from Hooterville and his noisy bag of corn chips. “Is there someplace near here where I could get a cup of coffee and something to eat?”

He pointed to the automatic coffeemaker on the counter, to the racks of shrink-wrapped snack food; the pot was half full, had probably been that way all night.

“Thanks, but I’m really picky about coffee.” It came out shitty, but she’d forced down enough cups of the bitter sludge that passed for gas-station coffee to know better. “I was hoping for a restaurant, or maybe a coffeehouse?”