From the title story "All’s Fair":  

“This part of the country was unknown to her. On the map, the region had stretched brown and vast, like a remote outback. They had chosen Palm Desert because if was not far from Los Angeles, where their daughter now lived. The first week they arrived, Carol drove in from L.A. and took Joyce to every market, pharmacy, shoe repair shop, and movie theater in town. She remembered that week as a dizzy blur of storefronts and blanched scenery, her daughter like a breathless tour guide working the crowd.  

Late fall, she remembered, and the sun had still beamed hotly.  Indian summer, she’d been told. The thermometer rarely dipped below ninety degrees. Hot winds had electrified her skirt and splayed her gray hair like a starfish across her forehead. Pavement shimmered. She’d felt like an image on overexposed film, the stark light revealing how she’d let herself go: unplucked eyebrows, the dry skin around her mouth solidifying into wrinkles.”

From the story "Horse, Rope, Mud, Rain":

"Ann’s fingers worked the slipknot. The horse thrashed his legs against the bars. Mr. Ray moved toward the frightened animal, who grew still and blinked his startled eyes free of rain, the whites flashing. Mr. Ray threw the loop around his front left leg. The horse flinched and kicked a hind leg against the pipe.

“Easy,” Mr. Ray coaxed. Rain dripped off the rim of his hat. His hooked nose was an irritated shade of red, his blue lips pursed tightly. “Celia, get the other leg. Where’s Page?”

Ann stayed silent, even though she normally spoke for the group. She pictured Page’s defiant face in the barn, which smelled of damp sawdust and echoed the sound of horses chewing hay.

“Tomorrow,” Page had said, “I’m not coming to work, because I’ve decided to sleep with Larry Dunbar.” Ann’s eyes had opened wide. Page often said things for effect, her free and unfiltered way of talking good for both admiration and laughs. But Larry Dunbar? She couldn’t be serious. The girls had had so many conversations beneath the barn’s rafters. Fear of high school, the man in the raincoat who had flashed them in the drugstore, but losing your virginity to a guy like Larry Dunbar? Page couldn’t be telling the truth.

From the story "Marta del Ángel":

“My name is Marta del Ángel. It’s a pretty name; I am named after my father’s dead sister. In California they call me Martha with a tongue stuck to their top front teeth when they come to the “t.” It sounds different here, like they are going to spit.

I married an American man I met in a supermarket parking lot. He worked in construction, and when I met him he was sitting in his truck swallowing beer. I fell in love with his arms; they were golden from the sun and a thin film of dust glistened on his blonde hairs. These are the things of love, my father once told me. “Cuídese, mi hija. It only takes one thing.”