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you need. But you got to pay the price, eh?”
    She slammed the door.
    I stood looking at my reflection, wondering what she had seen in my face. That I was a murderer? Had forced my best friend onto the street and to her death? I felt suddenly hot even with the devil winds spinning down the street.
    I waited to see if the woman would come back and saymore. When she didn’t, I held my hand up to the glass to cut the reflection and peered inside the shop. She gathered some herbs and shook them into a pouch, her cigar making a halo of smoke over her head. She set the pouch on the counter, then glanced at me and laughed. She spread her arms and closed her eyes, her fingers stretching. She mumbled something over the pouch, then followed the women in white to a back room. I opened the door quickly, the bells chiming a warning, stole the pouch from the counter, and ran with it down the street.
    At the corner I turned to see if the woman had come out. No one was there, and for some reason I didn’t understand, I felt disappointed that she hadn’t chased me down. I wondered if the old woman was only one of my dreams…but the pouch was real I held it to my nose and breathed deeply, licorice and thyme smells filling my lungs. The puppy sniffed and licked the pouch until its nose was covered with a fine gray powder.
    I walked two more blocks, then turned down the crooked sidewalk that led to the row of houses where I lived. Our house had belonged to my grandparents, but after they died, it passed to my mother. I know they worried about my beautiful mother, a late-in-life baby, who spoke such a strange mix of Quechua, Spanish, and English that when she went to school no one understood her. Some days I could still smell my grandmother’s cooking inside our home, but mostlyI smelled the salt of sweat and smoke from my mother’s boyfriends.
    When I got near the house, Mrs. Mulligan, our next-door neighbor, slammed out the front door of her small stucco house, holding a casserole with ragged blue potholders. Her three oldest sons were stretched under her old rusted Buick, their long legs and cowboy boots sticking out from beneath the chrome. They had come from Oklahoma years ago but still dressed as if they expected to find a rodeo in the Hollywood Hills.
    “Kata, wait,” Mrs. Mulligan called, her red hair trying to escape from the scarf tied tight around her wide head. Boxer, her towheaded toddler, peeked around her pink flowered muu-muu and waved two wet fingers at me.
    “Don’t speak to her,” one of her sons said from under the car, “We got enough trouble with her without you starting more.”
    “I’m just asking how she is,” Mrs. Mulligan said, her voice straining to sound cheerful.
    “You just listen to us,” another twangy voice came from under the car’s radiator.
    “Okey-dokey,” Mrs. Mulligan said.
    She handed me the dish. “It’s a tuna casserole,” she whispered. “I know it’s your favorite. Well, you won’t be able to eat today, but I wanted to do something.”
    I stuffed the sweet-smelling pouch into a pocket,balanced the pup, and took the hot casserole in the soiled potholders, the fishy smell steaming into my face.
    “I heard about your Ana,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
    “Mom, are you still talking to her?” a voice said as the dolly’s metal wheels scraped the driveway and one pair of legs grew a body.
    Mrs. Mulligan hurried away before her son Judd could stand. He had a dark tan and deep blue eyes. He pushed a greasy hand through his blond hair and looked at me.
    “You stay away from us,” he said, pointing his wrench.
    I ran around the cinder-block wall up to my house and hurried inside to hide the tears that were becoming stronger than my will to hold them back.
    The wind followed me inside and rippled through the layers of cigarette smoke hanging in the living room. I set the casserole down on the coffee table before my fingers blistered, then cradled the puppy slipping from my