“No. But I don’t think you get it from sitting out one afternoon.”

She pushed the stroller back and forth in an absent-minded way, digging a matched set of ruts into the dust. “Come to think of it, though, I guess that’s a little different from the way Mrs. Parsons is. Somehow it’s more excusable to be mean to your own relatives.”

She rubbed her neck and turned her face to the sun again. Lou Ann’s face was small and rounded in a pretty way, like an egg sunny side up. But in my mind’s eye I could plainly see her dashing out the door on any given day, stopping to say to the mirror: “Ugly as homemade sin in the heat of summer.” No doubt she could see Granny Logan in there too, staring over her shoulder.

After a while I said, “Lou Ann, I have to know something for Turtle’s and my sake, so tell me the honest truth. If Angel wanted to come back, I mean move back in and have everything the way it was before, would you say yes?”

She looked at me, surprised. “Well, what else could I do? He’s my husband, isn’t he?”

There may have been a world of things I didn’t understand, but I knew when rudeness passed between one human being and another. The things Mrs. Parsons had said about aliens were wrong and unkind, and I still felt bad even though weeks had passed. Eventually I apologized to Estevan. “She’s got a mean streak in her,” I told him. “If you’re unlucky enough to get ahold of a dog like that, you give it away to somebody with a big farm. I don’t know what you do about a neighbor.”

Estevan shrugged. “I understand,” he said.

“Really, I don’t think she knew what she was saying, about how the woman and kid who got shot must have been drug dealers or whatever.”

“Oh, I believe she did. This is how Americans think.” He was looking at me in a thoughtful way. “You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.”

I wanted to tell him this wasn’t so, but I couldn’t. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I guess it makes us feel safe.”

Estevan left Mattie’s every day around four o’clock to go to work. Often he would come down a little early and we’d chat while he waited for his bus. “Attending my autobus” was the way he put it.

“Can I tell you something?” I said. “I think you talk so beautifully. Ever since I met you I’ve been reading the dictionary at night and trying to work words like constellation and scenario into the conversation.”

He laughed. Everything about him, even his teeth, were so perfect they could have come from a book about the human body. “I have always thought you had a wonderful way with words,” he said. “You don’t need to go fishing for big words in the dictionary. You are poetic, mi’ija.”

“What’s miha?”

“Mi hija,” he pronounced it slowly.

“My something?”

“My daughter. But it doesn’t work the same in English. We say it to friends. You would call me mi’ijo.”

“Well, thank you for the compliment,” I said, “but that’s the biggest bunch of hogwash, what you said. When did I ever say anything poetic?”

“Washing hogs is poetic,” he said. His eyes actually twinkled.

His bus pulled up and he stepped quickly off the curb, catching the doorway and swinging himself in as it pulled away. That is just how he would catch a bus in Guatemala City, I thought. To go teach his classes. But he carried no books, no graded exams, and the sleeves of his pressed white shirt were neatly rolled up for a night of dishwashing.

I felt depressed that evening. Mattie, who seemed to know no end of interesting things, told me about the history of Roosevelt Park. I had just assumed it was named after one of the Presidents, but it was for Eleanor. Once when she had been traveling across the country in her own train she had stopped here and given a speech right from a platform on top of her box car. I suppose it would have been a special type of box car, decorated, and not full of cattle and bums and such. Mattie said the people sat out in folding chairs in the park and listened to her speak about those less fortunate than ourselves.

Mattie didn’t hear Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech, naturally, but she had lived here a very long time. Thirty years ago, she said, the homes around this park belonged to some of the most fortunate people in town. But now the houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritic hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles. Most had been subdivided or otherwise transformed in ways that favored function over beauty. Many were duplexes. Lee Sing’s was a home, grocery, and laundromat. Mattie’s, of course, was a tire store and sanctuary.

Slowly I was coming to understand exactly what this meant. For one thing, people came and went quietly. And stayed quietly. Around to the side of Mattie’s place, above the mural Lou Ann and I called Jesus Around the World, there was an upstairs window that looked out over the park. I saw faces there, sometimes Esperanza’s and sometimes others, staring across the empty space.

Mattie would occasionally be gone for days at a time, leaving me in charge of the shop. “How can you just up and go? What if I get a tractor tire in here?” I would ask her, but she would just laugh and say, “No chance.” She said that tire dealers were like veterinarians. There’s country vets, that patch up horses and birth calves, and there’s the city vets that clip the toenails off poodles. She said she was a city vet.

And off she would go. Mattie had numerous cars that ran, but for these trips she always took the four-wheel Blazer and her binoculars, and would come back with the fenders splattered with mud. “Going birdwatching” is what she always told me.

After she returned, a red-haired man named Terry sometimes came by on his bicycle and would spend an hour or more upstairs at Mattie’s. He didn’t look any older than I was, but Mattie told me he was already a doctor. He carried his doctor bag in a special rig on the back of his bike.

“He’s a good man,” she said. “He looks after the ones that get here sick and hurt.”

“What do you mean, that get here hurt?” I asked.

“Hurt,” she said. “A lot of them get here with burns, for instance.”

I was confused. “I don’t get why they would have burns,” I persisted.

She looked at me for so long that I felt edgy. “Cigarette burns,” she said. “On their backs.”

The sun was setting, and most of the west-facing windows on the block reflected a fierce orange light as if the houses were on fire inside, but I could see plainly into Mattie’s upstairs. A woman stood at the window. Her hair was threaded with white and fell loose around her shoulders, and she was folding a pair of men’s trousers. She moved the flats of her hands slowly down each crease, as if folding these trousers were the only task ahead of her in life, and everything depended on getting it right.

True to his word, Angel came back. He didn’t come to move in, but to tell Lou Ann he was going away for good. I had taken Turtle for a doctor’s appointment so I didn’t witness the scene; all I can say is that the man had a genuine knack for dropping bombshells at home while someone was sitting in Dr. Pelinowsky’s waiting room. But of course, I had no real connection to Angel’s life. It was just a coincidence.

Turtle was healthy as corn, but as time went by I got to thinking she should have been taken to a doctor, in light of what had been done to her. (Lou Ann’s main question was: Shouldn’t you tell the police? Call 88-CRIME or something? But of course it was all in the past now.) I had thought of asking Terry, the red-haired doctor on the bicycle, but couldn’t quite get up the gumption. Finally I called for an appointment with the famous Dr. P., on Lou Ann’s recommendation, even though he wasn’t exactly the right kind of doctor. His nurse agreed that he could see my child this once.