Laura had been brought up on a subsistence ranch outside Gallup. She’d learned to drive in all sorts of weather, but thick mud was the absolute worst. Every time she’d gone to the Navajo Nation Fair, she’d needed a tow out of the muddy field where everyone parked.

Dark surrounded her car, and she put on her high beams, bending forward to follow the curve of the road. She’d learned one important thing: don’t stop. If she did, she’d be stuck.

She’d grown up attending school in a multicultural town, but as an Anglo she was a minority, and even more so when she went to UNM at Gallup. Her girlfriends had gone to the big campus in Albuquerque, but there had been no money for that for her. Sally Tom, a Navajo beauty, had befriended her, and made the difference she always needed. Sally, a former Miss Navajo Nation, took Laura out of her shell and taught her how to open up.

Laura had forgotten how the Navajo who lived in the area did not put their homes near the road. She saw side tracks branching off on either side, and in a few instances, the glow of lights at a distance. Don’t stop!

Those days at college had been wonderful. Sally had introduced her to the shy Navajo man who Laura had fallen in love with at once. They’d begun seeing each other until the bottom fell out of her world. First Laura’s aunt, and then her uncle, had sickened and required hospitalization.

At one point as the vehicle lurched upward on the winding road, her wheels began to spin. Laura floored the car, jerking it forward. Don’t stop! How long had she been on this road? It felt like forever, or maybe time had stopped.

Her relatives, the couple who had raised her after her parents had been killed in an auto accident, had been airlifted to Phoenix. She followed them there, leaving school and courses unfinished. After they died within days of each other, she’d sold the ranch and gone back to school. Sally was there but the young man she’d fancied was gone. Rumor had it he’d been called back home for a family emergency.

At one point, a light rain began falling in the darkness. Laura cracked open the window and smelled the clean scent of pine. She crested some hill and the road wound downwards. Lights flickered to her right, but she couldn’t see the turning. Don’t stop!

Graduation and the two jobs in Phoenix had come next. Laura kept in touch with Sally, even fitfully, by e-mail and the odd phone call. Eleven months ago, she’d received an offer to interview at the famous resort spa in California near Death Valley. What a disaster. Laura had woven a fantasy about this job; it would be the breakthrough, the push she needed to succeed.

The only success had led to her embarrassing termination. Sitting woodenly while the Human Resources woman, all the time wearing a phony smile, berated her for not being what she claimed she was on her resume. “We expected someone who could fit in with all personalities, you know.” Laura could have asked her about a few other wrong things, like the drunken manager who pawed her when no one was looking or the head hostess who seemed threatened by her, but what was the point.

Now she was slip-sliding down the barely visible track, waiting with almost fatal calm for the moment when the car’s wheels locked and she was forced to stop. Don’t! Laura could imagine the headlines in the Gallup Independent: “Local Woman Dies on Back Road.”