By six months Cecelia had learned to crawl and had tough skin on her little knees; Kate had received and spent the last installment of her stipend; the rainy season was about to begin again; they could feel the waiting in the air, the heaviness, the moisture-laden wind, the rainy season embossed on the cloudy sky. The televisions and VCRs for their clinics in the campo had not arrived. Frank had heard that the caravan from northern Indiana had broken down near Guatemala City and they were waiting for truck parts to come in. The drivers were Quakers. Not one of them had been any farther south than Houston. Kate watched the map on the wall in the clinic, tracing the route of the Quakers, imagining what they must be going through to bring the truckloads of donated school supplies, clothing, medicine, bicycles, tractor parts, whatever odds and ends people were willing to get rid of or had an abundance of. She hadn’t been back to the States in a long time but she could still imagine that abundance, the cornucopia of shopping malls, the grocery carts piled high, the accretion of things and more things in the garages and basements of North America. What she steeled herself to face: the culture shock.

She and Maggie would go back and face all that together.

Kate had been crying; she cried when she and Deaver made love or whatever it was, tears wetting her face when she came. She could still come. Sometimes the body wants to know nothing of the heart; the body seeks its own experience. The bed was damp with humidity and their sweat. Semen trickled vexingly between her thighs. A knot of tension bloomed in her muscled upper back. She was exhausted. She had wanted to leave Managua months before; the waiting had been a burden, a daily task. Cecelia’s baby smiles, the way she matched whatever she was given, were love and loss all in the same moment. Kate had borrowed a little money from Deaver to live on until she installed the televisions and trained a woman in each clinic to use the videos. After that, she had planned—hoped—that she and Maggie and Deaver would travel to Antigua, Guatemala, where they had Sunny and Ben, where they could simply relax before going on to the States. A parrot screamed from the house next door. Not far away, the crow of roosters. The grind of bus gears.

Deaver leaned in the doorway, smoking a Payaso and tapping the red cigarette package with its smiling clown face against his leg. Shirtless. Lean and dark-skinned. His back looked still—after everything, perhaps more than ever now that they were nearly finished talking out the end—like luxury, what she might never have again. She thought, You just don’t know. In your forties passion is not a predictable possibility. The light was gray-blue in the room, his studio and bedroom, a light that could have been fading day as well as morning before sunrise. A pile of smooth hairless puppet heads lay on the dresser. Liter cans of paint were stacked against one wall. The house smelled like mildew and pine and mahogany chips, carpenter’s glue and felt, marijuana and yeast bread rising. No matter where Deaver lived—Merida, San Cristóbal, or Managua—his house smelled the same. Behind high street walls, all the rooms opened onto a bleak little sunless courtyard and that is what Deaver stared into, with his jeans barely pulled over his buttocks.

“You have never,” he said flatly, “never really cared about what was happening here.” He did not turn around.

“How can you say that?” Kate said. She sat up abruptly, the sticky sheet tangling around her legs.

He said, “Don’t whine at me.”

“Don’t accuse me.”

“You don’t really have any politics.”

He flicked his cigarette butt into the courtyard.

Silence. They’d been over all this before.

Kate said, “That’s not what matters now.”

“What does matter?”

“What matters to me,” Kate said, a knot of tears clotted in her throat, “is what we were going to do. And that now we’re not. And finding a way to get through the beginning of that. I’ll be fine once I get through the beginning.” She said that but she did not know if it was true.

A rooster crowed again. Deaver walked to the bed and knelt down beside her. He tucked her hair behind one ear and lifted her chin. He wanted her to look into his eyes. She would not.

“I’ve loved you,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Kate did not answer.

Very softly he spoke again. “Don’t you see I can’t?” His voice was weary from saying it. “I played it out. I imagined it.”

“It’s not like moving to the moon.”

“To me it is.”

“I need to be alone,” she said, “to work it out.” Out on the patio a woman went by, a boarder in the house, a woman who left bottles of scent, massage oil, gels, perfumes on the shelves in the bathroom. “I’m sad is all. It’s another piece of my life.”

Deaver stood up abruptly. He grabbed his leather belt and began sliding it through his belt loops. “I know that. You think I don’t understand that. But I do.”

Her skin felt raw. Kate pulled the rough sheet away from herself, sat up, feeling with her feet for her sandals on the floor, pushed back her hair, looked around for her glasses, her clothes.

Only habit made her say, “I’ve got to go now.” As though it were any other morning; as though they had slept the night together and she had to go to work; as though they would sleep the night together again soon.

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” Deaver said. He plucked his black T-shirt from a wad of clothes at the foot of the bed. He hesitated, took one step closer, touched her shoulder and fingered her dark hair.

“Please—don’t—touch me—anymore,” Kate whispered, rocking slightly on the edge of the bed.

He punched his arms into the T-shirt sleeves, jerked it over his head on the way out the door. An athletic anger surrounded his body, a violent light.

Kate put on her glasses, shivered, and got dressed. Her clothes comforted her oddly: her rumpled khakis, her cotton shirt.

She couldn’t remember the new boarder’s name. She could hear her singing in the kitchen. Deaver said she had a revolutionary’s heart. There would be a moment when they would hold their gaze ten seconds longer than usual. Like a flower opening. If not her, someone else, and soon. Perhaps it had happened already. Deaver would say, Christ, we’re erotic animals, aren’t we?