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Finally, Juana fell silent, too.
    “Señor Pico bought a goat that I must cut up and salt tonight” was what he said first.
    “Where’s the goat?” she asked.
    Juana peered at the goat, hanging by its hind legs from one of the strongest branches of the flame tree. She then examined her man’s face, perhaps sensing that something disagreeable had taken place, something he was not telling yet.
    “How was the journey?” she asked.
    “Too fast,” reported Luis. “Don Ignacio went too fast going to the barracks. Señor Pico went too fast coming back. I thought you’d have to go and plant a white cross on the side of a mountain for me. They say those automobiles are made for automobile races. I felt like we were in one.”
    “Are you still shaking?” Juana asked, wrapping her large arms around his meager frame.
    “I haven’t told you even half the tale,” Luis said. “Señor Pico was the one driving on the return. I have never seen a man so overjoyed. It wasn’t his fault. Who can blame him?”
    “Blame him for what?” Juana asked.
    “Señor Pico was driving and talking. The closer we came to the house, the faster he went. He asked Don Ignacio all sorts of questions about the children. When Don Ignacio wouldn’t tell him for the seventh and seventy-seventh time how big the children were, who they looked like and so much else, Señor Pico went even faster. When we reached the road near the ravines, we saw three men walking ahead—”
    “Blessed Mother who gives life, forgive us,” Juana interrupted. She raised both her hands up in the air as though to complain to the stars.
    “Señor Pico shouted at the men and blew the klaxon,” Luis continued. “Two of the men ran off. The other one didn’t seem to hear the horn. The automobile struck him, and he went flying into the ravine. He yelled when the automobile hit him, but when we came out to look, he was gone. It was a bracero, maybe one who works at Don Carlos’ mill.”
    I knew most of the people who worked with Sebastien at Don Carlos’ mill, lived in Don Carlos’ compounds, and toiled in Don Carlos’ cane fields. The valley was small enough that most of us were familiar with one another. I thought immediately of Sebastien. Surely another worker would have come for me already had Sebastien been struck by Señor Pico’s automobile.
    Something rustled under the flame tree. We all jumped to our feet. I expected to see Sebastien running towards me, his body drenched in blood. Instead, it was Doctor Javier and his younger sister, Beatriz. Beatriz spent her days pounding her fingers on a piano in her mother’s parlor and speaking Latin to herself. She wanted to be a newspaper woman, it was said, travel the world, wear trousers, and ask questions of people suffering through calamities greater than hers. Señor Pico had been courting Beatriz—who had no interest in him—before he began pursuing the señor a. One day, when Beatriz had abruptly asked him to leave her mother’s parlor so she could play her piano alone, the señor had stumbled down the road in a haze of lovesick rejection and seen Señora Valencia, who was plucking red orchids from her father’s garden to put in the small vase at her bedside. Señor Pico, known to her only as Beatriz’s frequent escort at local society gatherings, suddenly joined in the orchid picking and after a month of visits to the señora’s parlor asked Papi for her hand in marriage. Papi said yes after consulting with the señora, on the condition that his daughter would stay in her own comfortable house rather than having to live in one of those meager isolated bungalows near the barracks, where Señor Pico often needed to be located due to his special military duties.
    Juana rose to greet the doctor and Beatriz. Beatnz had braided some bright ribbons into her caramel-colored, calf-length hair; the braid swayed back and forth like a giant fish skeleton across her back.
    Nodding to Juana, Doctor Javier asked,