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her clothes on the metal rail hanging over the back seat. All of us who drove back and forth to school had one like it. Everything was slung in a heap under the railing, she got in between her father and mother in front, and they drove off. The white starched net of the petticoats we wore in layers beneath full skirts was so buoyant that hers rose and fell against theclosed back windows like foamy waves imprisoned.
    I still wanted Tony Gregory. I wrote him letters full of descriptions of my everyday life. I went here, did this, saw that and at the end of each one I said I missed him. My parents, I reminded him, had insisted I come to Galveston. They wouldn’t send me back to Boulder anytime soon. His letters to me were brief: he was sometimes bitter about our need to live according to others’ rules, and yes, he missed me too, but he had to go to school the rest of the summer. For once he was so sensible I wondered if I loved him more than he loved me?
    I turned to look back at Emmett who was still lying on the beach, his legs straight out in front of him. Beside him Luis was digging in the sand with both hands.
    A fat gray-haired woman holding her skirt up out of the water waded near me. A little boy clinging to her hem in back, began dipping it into the water behind her. She wheeled around.
    “Let go, Jimmy. Here I try to keep dry and you’re getting me all wet.”
    She grabbed up her skirt tighter in one hand and gave the boy the other.
    By the time I’d walked back to Emmett, I saw he was asleep.
    Luis looked up and said, “Don’t worry. He’ll be all right soon.”
    “Has he been drinking all afternoon?”
    “Possibly. I stopped by around three. He was drinking then.”
    I knelt beside him and watched while he traced the outline of a figure in the sand. It was a face of some kind maybe. He’d added some small shells and sargassum all tangled like hair on top.
    “What is this?”
    “Nothing. If I had some plaster, I could make a casting.”
    “What would it look like?”
    “Like it does here only reversed.”
    “A mask then?”
    “Maybe.”
    Some quality in his voice made me study him. Until then I don’t think I’d truly looked at him. He was just another guy Emmett had met in a bar, somebody helpful. Emmett seemed to have helpful friends around, other boys who would see he got home safely. Probably he attracted people who liked to look after others. Luis, when I saw him more clearly, was first of all, a beautiful color, a golden tan. His hair, short as everybody’s, had been sun bleached, brown to almost blonde. He had a long face, a long nose, blue-green eyes. I thought him handsome, though a little odd and, in some undefined way, different. I kept looking at him while I told him we were in Galveston visiting an aunt and uncle. Once anyone began talking to Luis, I learned later, they began telling him things.
    “Emmett’s from Mullin, a little place near Leon where I live. I doubt you’ve ever heard of either of them. They’re just Central Texas towns that exist for the people who live there, for them and their congressman, and…the newspapers if a tornado or a flood comes along.”
    “Oh?”
    “Emmett goes to A&M. I’m at the university … in Austin.”
    He nodded. “I went to art school there.”
    “And now?”
    He was staying with his father that summer. He’d been living in Mexico, in Guanajuato.
    “I don’t know it. I was in Cuernavaca once for a few weeks studying Spanish. It wasn’t long enough to learn much. I’d like to go back.”
    Luis laughed. “At least you’re trying. Most people here don’t.”
    “I know. My father says we are provincial. He hates traveling himself, but he insists that I learn a foreign language.”
    “You like traveling more than he does then?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    At twenty I’d been moving most of my life. In forty-two we went with Mother to Florida to join our father. He lived on his post while we shifted from to rent house to rent