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hands,” Laura said. I offered them to her, palms up.
    She held them carefully at first, as if getting acquainted with an alien object. She massaged my knuckles with her longest fingers and my palms with her thumbs, maternally; fingertips tepid and unused, the color of raw pork meat.
    “Beautiful hands,” she said. “So soft and young. How old are you?”
    “Twenty-six.”
    She looked me in the eye, and chuckled.
    “I’m forty-five,” she said. “There. I said it. Now let’s pretend I didn’t.”
    “I’m cool with that,” I said, my hands still in hers.
    “Anything else you may want to know before we move on?”
    “You said you’re married.”
    “I am.” She sighed, her face sagged. “We moved to Austin five years ago, but he still spends most of his time in Mexico. Taking care of the business, or so he says. We have two girls, one finishing college, the other starting. They’re both on the East Coast. I’m stuck here, in this big, supercosmopolitan metropolis full of pickup trucks, where you may run into vultures and deer on every corner. Lovely, isn’t it?”
    I wanted to ask why she’d left Mexico, but I didn’t.
    “So, which part of the city are you from?” Laura’s face got playful again.
    “Are you gonna guess my neighborhood by abusing my hands?”
    “Why not?” She smelled like classic perfume, perhaps Chanel No. 5. “Are you afraid of a human’s touch? Have you become that American already?”
    “It’s not that, ma’am. I just wanna show a little resistance. I think you’ll like that.”
    “You’re definitely south. Jardines del Pedregal?”
    I laughed. I put my hands in my pockets and swiftly kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was a peach.
    Later, we saw our own clean clothes tumble away inside the machines. She rested her head on my shoulder.
    “Give me your phone,” she said.
    Laura pointed the camera toward us, her slender naked arm outstretched, her flesh loose and freckled, and broughther face close to mine. She closed her eyes, and took the first snapshot. In the days that followed we’d photograph each other like crazy. Pictures of us eating raw octopus; pictures of us in bed taken against the burning background of the hills. Pictures of me caressing the side of her breasts. What would her daughters say if they saw these photos? I’d ask. What about her husband? She’d say she didn’t care, and keep snapping, amour fou–style.
    She pretended to lick at my ear and said:
    “One more. Say por vida!”
    The laundromat was filling up with young hipster couples, middle-aged men, and frumpy single mothers, children hot on their trail. There was something tragic about washing your clothes in front of others, and I wondered why Laura would be here voluntarily.
    “You haven’t told me your name yet.”
    “Plutarco. Plutarco Mills.”
    “A portentous name for a dashing young man,” Laura said. “I think we don’t speak the same lingua anymore, Mr. Mills.” From then on, she always called me by my last name. It turned me on. The sound of my name on her lips made my limbs and ears rattle. Had I known what would happen afterward, I’d have recorded her voice with my phone.
    “Yes we do,” I contested. “Not only do we speak the same language, we also respond to the same impulse.” Listening to Laura made me feel at home: she twisted statements into questions that turned doubt into a familiar space.
    “No, we don’t, Mr. Mills. You’re young and still believe in things like love and the future. I don’t have the stomach to prove you wrong, not as long as my wrists are attached to my hands, but this you must know,” she said, and paused. “The main difference between us and other couples is not what youthink, those naughty clichés working up your cute little brain that make me yawn. The main difference between us, Mr. Mills, and them, all of them, is that the words that come out of your mouth, even the simplest ones, ripen into origami prunes in my heart.”
    I