She asked me to help her find a second job so she could have a place to live when the baby came. She’d been abandoned by her mother and kicked out of high school and had promptly gotten her GED and was already taking a class at the University of Utah extension.

I’d never met anyone with Ginny’s kind of sand. In the middle of all that she put herself and her body piercing and unborn child in harm’s way for me. If that wasn’t family, I didn’t know what was. I was more than grateful. I admired her and in my own way I was protective, though neither one of us was comfortable thinking about just what we meant to each other, or what we felt.

I thought maybe if I calmly reasoned with her. “Look around you, Ginny,” I said. “I’m headed out into the desert in this shit. Not exactly a safe place for a baby.”

“I’ve got two tests this morning and the sitter just called. She’s sick. My shift at Walmart starts at two. You can and you will. Belle is safer with you on 117 than in her crib.”

I was between a rock and a hard place, and it was obvious that between the two, Ginny was the rock.

“I have no choice. You have no choice,” she said, and walked back to her car.

Few things pissed me off more than hearing the phrase “You have no choice.” I’d heard it in one form or another all my life, sometimes from someone explaining a self-inflicted tragedy after making a bad choice. Usually it had been served up to me as a last resort in someone’s effort to convince me a crap sandwich was better than no sandwich at all.

“Please don’t do this, Ginny,” I shouted. “There is always another choice.”

“Then you make it. I don’t have time to argue.”

Pure Ginny. Nothing I could say was going to change her mind. It was up to me to stand up or stand down to the occasion. Ginny was in a bind and she needed me. Knowing her, just coming to me for a favor, to anyone, was an act of courage. How she managed school and work and the baby, plus the bookkeeping for me, and all of it at eighteen and alone, was both a mystery and a miracle. She had never asked for help. And despite the sharpness of her manner, she was asking. I’d never heard a complaint from her. One way or the other, I would deliver. I owed her, and more. She was a friend. She was family, or as close to one as I was ever likely to have. I was her first, best, and only choice and any man with a brain and worth his salt should welcome the privilege.

Ginny revved the old Nissan’s tired engine and the pistons knocked loudly in protest and puked blue smoke into the air.