The heat out here in the Bakersfield exurbs has this way of baking the common sense right out of your head by two o’clock in the afternoon. I was parked off the washboard stretch of dirt near the old rail spur, the Dodge Ram idling while the air conditioner blew lukewarm air against my knees. I had the ignition key halfway turned toward off because gas was sitting at $4.62 a gallon down at the Chevron, and every drop counted when you were running errands that didn’t make any sense.

Wallace had told me he was out at the salvage yard off Highway 58 dealing with some scrap aluminum from the county project. I knew better. Or at least the small, sharp part of my brain that still functioned knew better before I let hope sweet-talk me into staying stupid.

I didn’t want a roadmap. That was what I kept telling the girls down at the sewing circle whenever they asked how I put up with Wallace coming home smelling of stale grease and cheap diesel after midnight. I told them you just had to trust God to handle the turns in the road.

What I really meant was that I was too tired to look for the road signs myself.

I shifted the truck into drive and rolled another three miles down the gravel line until the scrub oak cleared enough to show the back of the old pump house.

Wallace’s flatbed trailer was tucked right behind the rusted-out water tank, sitting there like a confession waiting for a priest. The blue tarp was half pulled back, showing the dull red glint of stripped copper wire coiled up in neat, illegal heaps.

Fourteen thousand six hundred and eighty-five dollars worth of heavy-gauge wire from the new substation expansion on the east side of town.

My chest got tight, the kind of tight where you feel like you swallowed a handful of gravel. I sat there with my hands glued to the vinyl steering wheel, watching a turkey vulture circle lazily over the fence line. I had spent six months telling myself Wallace was just working late to pay off the truck repairs, praying for provision, calling it faith when I closed my eyes to the missing receipts in his glove box.

God isn’t going to wake you up with a detailed roadmap, I had told my sister Trudy just last Tuesday over a cup of instant coffee. You just have to trust He’s steering.

Well, the truck was steering straight toward a federal penitentiary, and I was sitting right in the passenger seat of my own denial.

The passenger door clicked open before I could put the truck in reverse. Wallace stood there in his faded grease-stained denim jacket, a pair of wire cutters dangling from his thick right hand like an extra finger. His face was streaked with grey caliche dust, and his eyes had that flat, empty look he got whenever he thought he was smarter than everyone else in Kern County.

He didn’t look surprised to see me. He looked annoyed, the way a man looks when a stray dog wanders into his yard and messes up his line of sight.

“You’re a long way from the grocery store, Darlene,” he said. His voice was lower than usual, carrying that flat Bakersfield drawl that didn’t leave room for arguing.

“Wallace, what is this?” I pointed a shaking finger at the blue tarp. “The sheriff was asking down at the diner yesterday about the substation break-in. They took three miles of primary line.”

He didn’t drop his chin. He didn’t even blink. He just leaned his forearm against the rolled-down window of the Dodge and spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the dry weeds.

“You wanted to trust me, didn’t you?” he asked, and there was something ugly and cold crawling behind his teeth. “You said faith is about believing even when you can’t see the whole picture.”

“This isn’t faith, Wallace. This is a felony.”

“It’s just the road we’re on,” he said, and he actually smiled. “You wanted to walk forward without knowing where we’d end up. Well, here we are.”

I tried to turn the key back the other way, but he reached through the window and wrapped his heavy, grease-stained hand right around the ignition cylinder, holding the key still. His fingers were hot and smelled of copper pennies and sweat.

“Get your hand off the key,” I said, my voice cracking right in the middle.

“We load this up or we lose the house, Darlene,” he said. His voice didn’t rise an inch, which was worse than if he had screamed. “You take your pick right now. You want to pray about it, or you want to lift the tailgate?”

The irony sat there in the cab with us, thick and heavy like the afternoon smog rolling in over the grapevine. I had prayed for guidance for three solid months, asking the Lord to show me a sign, to give me some kind of clarity in the middle of all our money trouble. And He had. He had led me straight to the exact spot where my husband was committing grand larceny, leaving me zero room to pretend I was innocent.

I looked at the wire cutters in his left hand. Then I looked at the little brown deposit envelope sitting on the dash with $87 in food money inside it.

“I can’t cover for this anymore, Wallace,” I whispered.

He let out a short, dry laugh that sounded like dry corn husks rubbing together in the wind. “You already did, Darlene. The truck is registered in your name.”

The blood rushed out of my head so fast the cab tilted sideways. I sat there staring at him through the dusty windshield, the realization hitting me like a fist to the ribs. Every loan, every scrap run, every title transfer I had signed without reading because I trusted him to handle the business end. It was all mine now.

“You put the title in my name,” I said.

“Faith means walking forward even when you don’t understand,” he quoted back at me, his voice dripping with that sick, twisted mockery. “Get out and grab the straps.”

I opened the truck door and stepped out into the dirt, the 104-degree heat hitting me like an open oven. Wallace turned his back and walked over to the trailer, confident I wasn’t going anywhere, because out here in the middle of nowhere, with my name on the registration and his mess in the bed, I wasn’t.

I looked down the long dirt track leading back toward the highway, three miles of baking dust without a single house in sight. I had wanted faith without clarity, and God had given me exactly what I asked for: the terrifying, blinding light of the truth, with nowhere left to hide.