“The heat has come for us,” our mother says. She wears wet turban towels on her head, she once heard some swami swear that it cools the body down.

“Don’t talk,” she says, “there’s no need for it.”

Powdered, we stand akimbo, holding ourselves out from ourselves in front of dusty-bladed metal fans, the powder blowing back behind us, whitening the dog, the cats, and Ma Mère.

There’s a run for ice. Louisa and I stay close to buildings, protected by their ledges, providing shade in narrow inches to the deli. The ice is all out. What remains at the bottom of the deli’s glass case is just a few chips we pick up and slide down the fronts of our shirts. We search for the deli’s air-conditioning vent, stand directly under it and hold our hair up from our necks, patting and waving away at our sweat.

“Can I help you ladies?” the deli man wants to know.

“We’re just looking,” Louisa says.

“Leave some cool air for us,” he says and he shows us the door.

*   *   *

The bang and brattle we hear is Manolo dragging an air conditioner through the house. Where he got it, our mother doesn’t want to know. They lift it to the window and turn it on and it shakes and thrums and loosens paint chips on the ledge. The dog barks and the cats arch their backs and hiss. Our mother bends down on her knees and prays, but still the cool air doesn’t come. Instead there is smoke and sparks we can see through the slitted vents.

“Merde,” our mother says, and she pulls the plug and opens the window and tips the air conditioner over so that it falls out the window, hitting the ground in the shrubby skinny treed lot with a loud smash.

Manolo swims in the dirty river, jumping off pylons in front of whores who are calling out Olympic scores for his leaps and dives and pointing out hazardous floating debris like a cooler and a two-by-four.

Our mother joins the whores.

“Nine-Six. Watch out for the floating can,” she yells.

Later the whores get up and head back to their places on the avenue, remembering as they go to hike up their skirts, peel back their necklines, let their breasts rise to the surface.

“There were men,” our mother says, “who wanted anything I left behind. One even collected my nail trimmings.”

“That’s too strange,” Louisa says. “Did you call the cops?”

Our mother laughs, “The cops? Yes, and a cop too. I dated one. He kept a photo of me up under his hat.”

“So it was everyone then? They all wanted you,” Louisa says. “The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You must have been lonely, you must have had no other girlfriends, just these men following you everywhere you went.”

Jody and Louise and I decide to ask the Ouija game where our father is. We ask if it our father’s in the country, and the Ouija spells out “r-a-i-n.” We ask it if we’ll see him again and it spells out “f-e-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-t.”

“Whatever happened to ‘yes’ or ‘no’?” Louisa says and while our fingertips are still resting on the pointer, it moves, landing on the word “goodbye.”

At the E & B, I take a package of hamburger meat for our dinner and slide it into my coat. It feels cold on my chest and I think maybe it’s a good thing to have it there, what if I walk outside and there’s a shoot-out on the street and I accidentally get shot, then the hamburger meat may stop the bullet or slow it down and I’ll live and the E & B won’t press charges for my thievery because they’ll be honored to say it was their pack of hamburger meat that saved the girl’s life. When I get home I see the blood from the package has leaked and stained my shirt red. Our mother runs to me, looking to see where I’m cut.

“It’s cow blood, fuck, leave me alone,” I say and push her away and run to the shower but I’ve got to wait because Uncle Manolo’s already in there, singing a Chilean love song and using up all the hot water.