Our brother writes the slut thinks she is getting bigger and she says it’s high time she did something about it. In evening sunsets, she looks at her rounded silhouette against walls. They are looking for a doctor on a street in need of repair, in need of front doors on buildings, in need of beads on its curtains in its doorways, in need of lights beyond the beaded curtains, in need of inner voices, instead of the trickle of water from faucets, the creak of timber on a stair. The slut puts her ear to the wall, says she hears the sound of metal instruments placed on porcelain trays.

They find the entrance of the place and it looks like all the others, strings where the curtain beads once were threaded sway in the breeze as if just parted, as if someone had just come through or just gone out. The slut enters first, her shoe heels loud on the broken tiled floor.

“Hola! Hola!” she says. No one comes. Our brother sits in a folding chair, one of many, by the door.

“That’s where the men wait,” she says when she sees him sitting in the chair.

Our brother gets out of the chair and walks to the stairwell. “Hola,” he says. A man comes down eating a peach. The man’s hands are all wet with the juices.

“Are you the doctor?” the slut asks him in Spanish.

The man looks to the left of him and then to the right of him and then he says, “Yes, I am the doctor.” The doctor leaves the peach on the desk and wipes his hand on a handkerchief.

“Where should I change?” the slut asks and the doctor points up to the ceiling. “Up the stairs?” the slut asks and the doctor nods. Our brother waits in one of the chairs where the men wait. When the doctor comes back down he reaches outside the doorway and rolls a metal gate down.

“Siesta,” the doctor says. When the slut comes down the stairs she is holding her belly and trying to work the back of her shoe onto her heel.

“There was nothing there,” the doctor says to our brother.

“Excuse me?” our brother says.

“No baby,” the doctor says.

“I didn’t think so,” our brother says. The doctor nods his head. There is the bill, anyway, written out on lined paper from a small pad with pictures of fluffy cats on the cover which the doctor doesn’t bother to rip off the page, but simply holds up the pad to show our brother the amount. To leave the place, the doctor lifts up the gate halfway, and the slut and our brother have to bend over and walk under it.

“I’m bleeding,” the slut says as they walk down the street.

Our brother nods his head.

“Maybe the doctor lies,” she says.

“What for?” our brother asks.

“To save the girls from guilt,” the slut says.

There is a lead. A man in a bar has seen a man who might be our father.

“A man who looks Americano because of the shirts he wears,” the man says.

Our brother and the slut sit at the bar every night. It is in a town by the sea and they hear the waves and feel a wind off the water while they sit on their stools. On the bar’s patio, the wind cools them and blows through their hair and they order many drinks.

There are a lot of Americanos who come to the bar, and the slut sometimes says, “I almost thought that was him,” and she’ll point and our brother will see a man who he thinks must be from Texas by his boots and his hat and he’ll say, “Him?” to the slut and she’ll say, “His jaw, just his jaw.”

They walk to their hotel late at night on the slick cobblestone streets, past castle ruins with glassless windows framing mountains and the moon. The slut holds her belly.

“That doctor left some inside me,” she says. “Maybe an arm or a leg. A heel,” she says. At the door to their rooms our brother wishes her goodnight and she takes his hand and puts it on her.

“Feel the kicks?” she says and our brother shakes his head and goes into his room.

When he thinks she’s fallen asleep, he goes out again to a dance club, a place he doesn’t expect to find our father, and watches all the Spanish girls in their short skirts and midriff tops moving in the flashing black lights and tries to catch their eyes.

At times he has told the slut he has given up hope for their father ever being in all of Spain and that he had better fly home. But the slut has grabbed onto his arm with her thin fingers cool through the madras shirt he has taken to wearing instead of the silk robe on days of record-breaking heat, and she begs him to stay, she can see her Cal on so many streets here, at so many bars, she is sure on days he is also swimming in the sea, breaststroking under the cloudless sky, his back red in the sun as he rises for his breaths, the water sliding off him leaving only the gleam of his burning skin.