Delia Ortiz’s escape from Manny Chavez begins as a child’s attempt to keep her family together and becomes the decisive break that allows Ellie Chavez to leave with her children. At seven, Delia was frightened of going, but she also recognized the danger in staying. When Manny tried to stop Ellie, Delia intervened; afterward, with their truck unavailable and no safe time to search for it, Ellie sought help from Sister Justine. Their departure from Sells began a separation from Manny that later became inseparable from Delia’s return to the reservation and her bond with Fat Crack Ortiz.

The choice to leave

Ellie’s plan was to take Delia and her baby brother, Eddie, with her to pursue a special program at Arizona State University. Sister Justine had helped her gain entry, and Ellie saw the opportunity as a chance to become a teacher rather than remain a teacher’s aide. Delia, only seven, did not want to leave. She asked whether she and Eddie could stay with their father or with their aunt, but Ellie believed neither arrangement would work. The choice was therefore not a simple move for education: Ellie was trying to take the children with her and leave a household in which she feared Manny would prevent her from going.

Manny appeared as Ellie was explaining the plan. Delia knew he had been drinking and understood that his presence changed the situation. He warned Ellie that if she left, she would not return with the children. Ellie refused to yield. What might have been an ordinary departure became a confrontation in which the children’s safety and Ellie’s ability to leave were directly at stake.

Delia intervenes

When Manny attacked Ellie, Delia and Eddie were both present: Delia watched from a corner, while Eddie cried in his crib. Ellie fought back, but Manny brought her down. As he moved to continue the assault, Delia rushed forward and struck him from behind at knee level. Manny lost his balance and fell against a coffee table. The bottle he was holding broke on the concrete floor. Delia’s action interrupted the attack long enough for Ellie to get back up and attend to the children.

Ellie checked Delia and Eddie for injuries from the broken glass and found that neither child had been hurt. The urgent task was to leave before Manny woke. Ellie had been packing carefully before the confrontation; afterward, she put in whatever would fit and sat on the overfilled suitcases to close them. The altered packing matters to the escape’s practical course: there was no leisurely preparation, only the quickest way to get the children and a few belongings out of the house.

A departure without the truck

Once outside with two suitcases, Ellie discovered that Manny’s pickup was gone. He had apparently hidden it to keep her from leaving. Searching for it might have been possible, but it would have cost time, and Ellie feared Manny might wake. She took the children on foot to the pay phone outside the trading post and called Sister Justine in Topawa.

Sister Justine came in the convent’s nine-passenger station wagon. Seeing Ellie’s condition, she recommended a hospital, but Ellie refused because she believed Manny would know to look for her there. She needed to get away first. Sister Justine accepted that decision, and the three of them left together. The escape was thus made possible not by the missing truck or a formal refuge, but by a phone call, a trusted helper, and a vehicle that could carry Ellie and both children to Topawa.

What the escape meant later

The book returns to this childhood departure through Delia’s adult understanding of her history with Fat Crack Ortiz. He was Leo’s father and the grandfather of the child Delia was carrying, but his importance reached further back: he had hired Delia and brought her back to the reservation years after she and Ellie had fled Manny’s home in Sells. Delia recognized him as the person who had made that original escape possible. The narrative does not detail how he enabled it; it establishes the fact as the foundation from which much of Delia’s later life, for good and ill, followed.

That retrospective connection changes the meaning of the escape. It is not only a childhood flight from Manny’s control, but also the beginning of a chain of dependence, return, and family obligation. As an adult, Delia knows that being at war with Lani Walker would worsen her already difficult situation with Fat Crack. Her awareness of what she owes him is rooted in the moment when, as a child, she acted to protect Ellie and then relied on others to help them leave. The escape marks a rupture with Manny, but it also leads toward Delia’s eventual return to the reservation and her complicated place within the Ortiz family.