Raquel let her brother open the door for Emma. She hadn’t wanted to deal with her mother’s translator yet, but Marcus said that Emma had come such a long way to help them. If she was eager to speak to them, they really couldn’t say no.

Raquel didn’t agree, but then she’d never understood why her mother let Emma stay in the guest room. A translator wasn’t family and her mother never referred to Emma as a friend. Yet every June her mother’s translator arrived, and so thin and high-strung it was impossible to relax when she was in the apartment. Her sunscreen was a problem, too. During Emma’s visits, the living room would begin to reek of those American lotions with an excess of zinc.

The story about the obese loan shark with the burps was just the sort of paranoid nonsense Emma would provide. A psychologist friend of her mother’s had already told them what must have happened. Her mother had suffered a sudden onset of amnesia or was in the throes of a dissociative fugue. How else to explain why a woman in her sixties would drag a suitcase into a tree?

Sure, her mother had always liked poker and liked to win. She often played poker games with them as children, and real games with her writer friends as well. In either case, she never gave away what sort of cards she was holding until the hand was over.

But her mother would never have played online, and for serious money. She’d never had serious money, and if a loan shark had observed what a good player her mother was and goaded her to raise the stakes with his money, her mother wouldn’t have risked it. What for? Her mother had a whole clan of elderly aunts in São Paulo who wired her cash whenever she needed it, although the calls had their cost, too. They always ended with her mother hunched over and apologizing, saying, You’re right, you’re right, that’s what I should’ve done.

As a teenager, Raquel had often made the calls for her. Each time, the aunts would recount the same story about her mother falling out of a tree as a child and hitting her head, how it explained everything. Still, the aunts always sent more than her mother requested. If her mother called too close to Shabbat, they wired the money first thing on Monday.

This man was making a joke of you, Raquel said to Emma.

He had a gun in his jacket.

Half the people in Rio have guns in their jackets, don’t they, Marcus? Raquel turned to her brother, but he’d taken a seat at their mother’s desk and was brushing aside various chocolate wrappers and crumpled napkins to find the keyboard.

Don’t turn on her computer, Raquel said. Leave it alone. She would never have gambled online. If she was on her computer, she was writing.

Marcus turned it on.