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whispering. In a weird way, it gets your attention even better.
    I remember Consuela didn’t speak English. The only things she could say were “Atula?” (which I guess isn’t English) and “Do you talk Spanish?” which of course I didn’t.
    I remember her name because it took me, like, half an hour to figure out what she was saying.
    Onsweda?
    Consweera?
    Consweto?
    Rodreekays?
    Rotrigaze?
    Rodrinkhaze?
    She was really patient and nice about it, but she finally just took my little message pad and wrote the name herself. She smiled and then went and stood in the back of the room. She waited all day. Sometime in the afternoon she managed to score a chair. By 4:30 there were only a couple of people left, and even though she didn’t have an appointment—who did?—she had a really good chance of seeing Atula that day.
    At about 5:00, Atula came out of her office and asked me if some man had called her. It was the sort of question Atula asked all the time. The name didn’t mean anything to me. I wouldn’t even have remembered her saying it, except that right then Consuela bolted. She knocked a chair over on her way out. It made this huge racket. We all kind of stopped and looked. Atula asked me who she was, and I told her. Atula shrugged as if she’d never heard of her and went back to her office. I crumpled up the pink paper with Consuela’s name on it and slam-dunked it into the wastepaper basket.
    That must have been sometime in late August, I guess. Consuela never crossed my mind again until that moment in the park.
    I was dying to find out what she was saying, but I couldn’t hear from where I was, and there was no way I could get any closer. There was just the car and wide open space between us. All I could do was watch through the windshield.
    Too bad I couldn’t lip-read. They were there for about an hour, but I still didn’t have a clue what was going on. Consuela talked. Byron talked. Andy said things every so often, but mostly she just scribbled stuff down on a big yellow legal pad.
    At about eleven, Byron said something, and suddenly the meeting was all over. I managed to get my head down about a nanosecond before they started coming right for me.
    I slid under the car and prayed.
    As they got closer, I started to make out what they were saying. Andy said something about having to get going. Then Consuela went, “Thank … you … for… my … ummm, ahhhh.” She said something in Spanish, and Byron said, “Children.” Consuela said, “Thank you for my cheeldren, Hhhhandy.”
    Andy just said, “Yeah, okay.” Byron and Consuela kept talking away in Spanish. The only words I could make out were “Adios,” when they left, and “Carlos,” because they said it, like, ten times and that’s the name of the guy in the Bonanza Burritos commercial. (“Who can eat another? Carlos can!”)
    Andy left by the little side street. By the sound of their footsteps, I guessed that Consuela and Byron were headed back downtown. I stayed under the car until I was sure they were gone. In fact, I stayed under the car until the guy who owned it came out and said, “What are you doing under my car? Get outta there! Don’t you know you can get yourself killed that way? Damn kid! What’s the matter with you?”
    I almost told him.

chapter
fifteen

Fraud
    Deceitful conduct designed to manipulate
another person to give up something of value
    T hings had changed since I’d listened to my spy recorder on the way to school that morning. I still felt like throw-ing up, but for different reasons. I thought at first that my mother had got herself messed up with some really bad guy. Now I thought my mother had got herself messed up with some really smart bad guy. Byron spoke Spanish as easily as he spoke English. Not just anyone could do that.
    There was also something about his whole, I don’t