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imagined my tongue inside her mouth, swollen purple and moist. The dryers buzzed, and our hot clothes collapsed to the bottom of the machines as if life had suddenly been sucked out of them.
    “Would you like to go out with me, Mr. Mills?” she asked as we pulled them out and tossed them back into plastic baskets, two jumbles of color and undistinguishable fabric that made no sense.
    We walked out into the hazy afternoon air. It felt heavy and metallic in the mouth. The unexpected taste of smog and burnt debris that arrived in gusts brought me back to Mexico City. Laura looked up and took a deep breath, and I realized we both felt the same. Nostalgia is the saddest form of glee.
    “One more thing,” she said by the door of her black Porsche Cayenne. “Condoms? Don’t bother. I couldn’t care less.”
    “What if I care?”
    “Let me ask you something, Mr. Mills,” Laura said, the commanding words not matching the sudden frail tone of her voice. “This game won’t have many rounds. Are you man enough to let the lady take the lead?”
    • • •
    “Mr. Mills!” Laura yelled on the phone. “We’ve got to celebrate!”
    It was noon on Friday and we weren’t supposed to meet until Saturday. The news that day was full of rumors that Michael Jackson had taken his own life and reports that theHill Country wildfires were reaching the shores of Lake Travis. Firemen from every corner of Texas and Oklahoma rushed in our direction as Jackson’s classics from the seventies and eighties topped the charts.
    “And why is that?”
    “Surprise, surprise! Can we meet now?”
    “I’m in the middle of something,” I said quietly so that only she could hear me.
    I was at the Brackenridge Hospital, translating for a family from Estado de México whose teenage son had been badly beaten the night before outside a gay bar on East César Chávez, and later dropped off by anonymous friends outside the emergency room. The kid’s mother was chubby and small. She looked devastated, her skin the color of cardboard blistered by the Texas heat. Her husband wore a ragged Longhorns cap, and explained that they were from Ixtlahuaca. I’d probably never heard of it, he said, but I had because most of the maids from home came from there. He’d been living in Austin for several years, but his son and wife had arrived only the year before. The boy was seventeen but had always shown a great talent for the arts, he said. The word arts sounded foreign in his mouth. He wanted to be a filmmaker; in recent months he’d been working on his first project, championed by his art teacher at school. “Teachers adore him,” the father said. The movie was titled Zombies and Narcos vs. Aliens, and was about zombies who are about to take over a small Mexican town controlled by a ferocious drug cartel when an extraterrestrial attack strikes. “He didn’t know who prevailed in the end,” the father said, his wobbly cheeks glossy wet and flushed. He looked insignificant and fragile in spite of his sunburnt, strong, hairless arms. I sucked at my job. I didn’t know how to comfort these people, how to make them believe that things would getbetter, because most of the time, they didn’t. I translated the doctor’s prognosis, that the kid had received too many kicks to the head, that the skull presented several fissures, and that the boy had slipped into an irreversible coma. My phone rang, and I asked them to excuse me for a minute. When I heard Laura’s voice, I felt grateful and safe, and cowardly.
    “Can we meet tonight then?” she asked.
    “Sure,” I said. “Where?”
    She said the laundromat. “I’ll bring some clothes, and we’ll celebrate while we watch them dry. How about that?”
    Years later, I still consider her words. I now divine longing and anxiety in her voice, but in that moment all I found was Laura’s unleashed self, a storm impossible to contain, an energy that made me want to laugh and be with her, to see her bare.
    When I