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Javier asked, “Has the father arrived?”
    “Yes, he has come,” Juana said. “Good evening, Señorita Beatriz.”
    “Salve!” replied Beatriz in Latin.
    “¡Hola! to you too, Señorita Beatriz,” Juana said, dusting off the back of her dress. “Will you please go into the house?”
    I didn’t stop worrying about Sebastien. As the laughter and Beatriz’s effortless Latin phrases echoed from Señora Valencia’s bedroom, I walked over to the flame tree and peeked at the dead goat Señor Pico had brought home. Near the bloody spot where the goat’s nose almost touched the ground lay my sewing basket and Sebastien’s still-unfinished shirt. I had dropped them there when I’d heard Señora Valencia’s first screams. I picked up the basket and Sebastien’s shirt and took them back to the rocker with me. The joyful reunion continued upstairs while Luis kept fanning the flames to keep Señor Pico’s bath warm.
    Soon after, Doctor Javier watched me from afar as he left with Beatnz. Señor Pico was ready for his bath; Luis carried the water to him.
    “My wife wishes to see you,” Señor Pico shouted at me from across the yard.
    I went to her room. She was lying in bed, alone for a brief moment, her children sleeping nearby.
    “I am grateful to you, Amabelle, for what you did today.” She reached over and squeezed my hands.
    When her husband entered the room in his sleeping robe, she quickly dropped my fingers. “Juana will stay here tonight,” she announced.
    Why Juana? Why not me? I thought. But maybe Juana had asked to stay. Perhaps she needed to cradle a cloud-soft child and pretend that it was hers. Besides, I had to go to my room and wait for Sebastien. Surely he would know what had happened, who had been struck by the automobile.
    Juana was in the old sewing room of Señora Valencia’s mother, piling blankets on the floor to sleep on. Behind her stood a four poster canopy bed that Papi had built long ago for his wife’s afternoon siestas.
    Señor Pico pulled shut his wife’s bedroom door to keep out the night air. I waved good-night to Juana, who was already dozing off. Juana blew out her lamp, leaving me in the dark.
    In their room, Señor Pico tried to make his wife laugh by telling her how much he had missed her all those nights when he’d been sleeping on stiff, narrow, insect-filled mattresses in the barracks.
    “Is it so terrible?” she asked.
    Yes, it was, he said. Even worse than that, if truth be told. Away from her, everything was like a seat on a metal bench in Hell.
    The señora asked her husband if he had to return to the barracks soon. The soldiers in his charge could wait awhile, couldn’t they?
    He’d try to stay through her lying-in period, he said, but things could change quickly. Had he forgotten to inform her? Where had his memory gone? The Generalissimo was spending some time with friends, not far from here. The Generalissimo’s good friend Doña Isabela Mayer was planning to throw a lavish ball for him near the border. He—her husband, could she fathom it?—had been given the task of heading a group that would ensure the Generalissimo’s safety at the border. They would also be in charge of a new border operation.
    Wouldn’t this take him away for even longer periods of time? Señora Valencia wanted to know.
    She was not to worry at all, he assured her. The operation would be quick and precise. To tell the truth, part of it had already started.
    She didn’t sound as happy as perhaps he had wanted her to be. “Let’s not speak of you leaving again,” she said. “At least you are with us now.”
    In the parlor, Papi sat alone, as he did every night, in a corner near the parlor’s accordion-shaped radio, straining to make out an announcer’s voice without disturbing the others. He was an exiled patriot, Papi, fighting a year-and-a-half old civil war in Spain by means of the radio. On his lap were maps showing different Spanish cities that he consulted with a hand