The summer had been worse than usual, the mercury rising to the 120-degree mark the past fourteen days straight. Dolores’s horse walked like a careful drunk, heat-stunned, incapable of doing anything quickly, though it seemed to her that he perked up when they reached Independence Avenue. Weather be damned, the bustle continued, the people crossing and recrossing the streets, shouting to each other: Three hundred! Three hundred? Three hundred! It was last week’s news but they couldn’t stop talking about it. Three hundred dollars for a flask of mercury. Women in twos paused by storefront windows, their fingers moving fancifully, sketching out plans for future pianos, ceiling fans, ice boxes. Dolores stepped into the bank preparing to wire a larger-than-usual sum to her parents, when a strong set of fingers gripped her elbow.

“You are in it! You are in it!” said Mr. Bartlett, his eyes red with rage.

“Mr. Bartlett! Please!”

His fingers bore into her. A burly clerk hurried over and after some struggle detached him. Dolores watched the clerk lead him away, a bruise forming on her elbow. Impossible that this was the accountant who had sat next to Grierson for years, unremarkable as a smooth stone. They said that he’d gone mad with grief, a cousin having died in a battle in Northern France. But others had lost too. Not all became unhinged. What was it that unhinged some and not others? Her mind leapt to James, in Northern France himself. He had left reportage on automobiles to cover the war and was now the Times’ main correspondent in France.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Scraperton?” The bank manager hovered in front of her.

“Yes, I am.” She realized that she was shaking. “But not Bartlett. What are we going to do with that poor man?” The manager took her to the back office where she was fussed over by two clerks and signed the transfer papers in a deep armchair while drinking iced tea. She left the bank feeling strangely powerful.

“Doña Dolores!” Ysidro waved from high up on the scaffolding of the new office building. She waved back, a little curtly. “Do you have a minute?” he shouted. “I’d like to ask you a question.” He scrambled down the scaffolding. He looked like those men you saw in the papers, matinee idols with painted lips and slender chests and greased-back hair. He jumped the last few feet to the ground, then paused to tip his hat at Carlotta Reyes, who was passing by in a yellow dress. She turned on her toes and returned his gesture with a mock curtsy.

Dolores barely contained a groan. She used to enjoy reading Ysidro’s file, the mountains of innuendo and possibility, although never an outright scandal. But then Owen assigned Victoria to help oversee the building project and the very thought of the file made her stomach flip. Owen insisted that there was no need to worry, but she remembered being sixteen, those afternoons with Kern Hook and his tarnished spur, that curiosity that melted all barriers of shame. Ysidro walked over to her, respectfully, all business.

“The mercury frieze has arrived,” he said.

“So?”

“I was hoping that you could inspect it and make sure it’s all right before I put it up. It would be nice to have it installed before Mr. Scraperton returns.”

She assented, curious to see the building. There had been grumbling in the beginning, the Anglo builders claiming that Ysidro did not deserve the commission, that he was too young and inexperienced, that Owen only gave it him to mollify the Mexicans. It had been right after the soldiers killed Rivera. But the structure looked good, the bricks elegantly mortared, the cornices handsome, everything tasteful and well done. The inside was cooler than the street and filled with the pleasant odor of fresh paint. Ysidro led her through the high-ceilinged lobby into a side room where the frieze lay on a paint-splattered sheet. It had arrived in one piece and seemed to be fine: a cement tablet embossed with the bronze form of naked youth, his sex decently covered by his money purse.

“It’ll look pretty with the sun shining on it,” Ysidro said.

Dolores grunted, noting a snake winding round a wand that the youth held in his hand. “Could you get rid of that snake?”

“The caduceus?” Ysidro raised an amused eyebrow. “I think that Miss Victoria would be a little upset.”

“Where did she find this?”

“She found the picture in a book of Dr. Badinoe’s and ordered it made. It’s a replica of an ancient Roman figurine. I think that they used to put these on their roads. She said that Mercury was their god of roads or transportation or something along those lines.”

“I don’t think that I’m the right person to inspect this. Why don’t you ask Badinoe—he’s our resident classicist.”

Ysidro squatted down to brush a fleck of dried paint off the snake’s neck.

Dolores left, filled with gloom and defeat. Victoria spoke more with Ysidro and Badinoe than she did with her own mother. She had tried to make peace with her. She had even helped feed the snakes in the pagoda, holding the sack of kangaroo rats that Victoria had pulled from her traps, the creatures still alive, bulging and breathing and squeaking inside the burlap. She could sense the softness of their bodies, their tiny bones. Victoria had tossed them off nonchalantly. Dolores watched the snakes strike, the wideness of their mouths, the pinprick of their fangs. Victoria had seen her shudder.

“What horrifies you so? It’s my tongue, isn’t it?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why do you want me to do a second operation?”

It had simply been a thought, a passing suggestion she’d made almost a year before. Perhaps another doctor, a slightly different procedure, and they could fix what was broken?

“I don’t care about that.”

“You do.”

“You don’t know everything that you think you do.”

Victoria’s tongue zipped out, prongs pointing meanly. She’d looked like a carnival geek. Why did her daughter hate her so? Maybe she was overreacting. At times Dolores thought of asking Badinoe for help. He and Victoria were thick as thieves. But she could not figure out how to broach the subject, or any subject, really, other than pleasantries. Years had passed, and he still made her feel as if she were a traitor. After seeing him, she’d find herself composing eloquent speeches and enacting heartwarming scenes in her head, justifications for her reunion with Owen. Not that there was anything to justify. She was his wife. It was her duty. But she wouldn’t have minded explaining things more fully. Of all people, Badinoe would have been able to appreciate the miracle of she and Owen wanting the same thing at the same time. She had wanted to tell him how planless it had been, how he had clattered up the steps and somehow the sound of his boots on the wood had made her understand that things were different. She had peeked through the lace curtain, confused, nervous as a Coahuila virgin. He had stopped in front of the door, hesitant, looking like he might turn back. She had opened the door before he could take off. His pleasure, his obvious pleasure at seeing her, was such that she stepped very close to him, her face turned up, knowing somehow, before he had said anything, that he would say the perfect thing. And he did: “Maybe you’re right.” He uttered the phrase with a glint of pride in his eyes, and a half smile, that trickle of humor, that underground spring that she forgot existed until it popped up unexpectedly.

How good it had been.

But it was impossible to tell any of this to Badinoe. The way he looked at her snuffed out any hope of conversation.

She rode by the park, stopping at the sight of two soldiers whacking someone or something with the butts of their rifles. She hurried over. It wasn’t a person. It was a yucca plant.

“What are you doing?” They stared at her mutely. She repeated her question.

“There might be dynamite under there, ma’am,” said the one named Floss.

She slid off her horse and kicked up the yucca spears. Floss reddened. The other, Grubb, tried to choke back a giggle. There was nothing below, only earth, stamped brown and silent. “Looks safe to me,” she said.

“Guess it’s under control,” Floss said to Grubb. Grubb followed him out of the park, doubling over in laughter. Dolores watched after them, glad that Victoria hadn’t been there—she’d be incensed about it for the next year.

Mrs. Lennox, looking like a misplaced African warrioress with her militant stride and her six-foot trash piercer, hurried over. Together they inspected the yucca plant. The spears were bent and broken in places, but the damage could be overcome. They bunched the spears together and wound them with string. Mrs. Lennox kept shaking her head and muttering, “The growth, the growth, the growth,” by which she meant the growth of the town, which, when the committee ladies weren’t blaming Dolores, they blamed for all evil. Indeed, Mrs. Lennox got so carried away by the growth that she forgot any displeasure with Dolores, and waylaid her for a half an hour, discussing her corns and her dinner party Sunday before getting back to the shameful state of the park.

“Trash everywhere! They even disfigured the fountain.”

“The fountain?”

“The insurrectionists wrote on it.” Mrs. Lennox sniffed. “Everyone has it out for us, soldiers, insurrectionists, job seekers. Look.” She led Dolores over to the fountain and pointed at the base. Someone had scraped quite discreetly, Viva Zizima!

“Zizima?” Dolores squinted at the small block letters. It took a moment for her to place the name.

“No, Zapata,” said Mrs. Lennox. “Viva Zapata! The anarchist.”

Dolores shook her head. It clearly said Zizima, Badinoe’s goddess of the mines, but she didn’t see the point of educating Mrs. Lennox on this particular matter. She stood up too quickly, disturbed by the message, and almost lost her balance.

Mrs. Lennox steadied her. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you. It’s been a trying day, that’s all.”

At the back of Offitz & Carruthers, Sam Mathews was running the mail desk. Dolores had never fully recognized the pleasure involved in riding over to pick up her mail until the wars broke out. What had once been an errand laced with possibility and elaborate fancies about who might have written and what they might have said had become an errand laced with dread. She hitched her horse and entered the store. Receiving any mail from Mexico felt well nigh miraculous. The letters that had gotten through had principally been from her parents. Astounding letters, far better than the ones that they had written in peace—the flavor of the pineapple they’d eaten, the names of the pigs on Tomaso’s farm, the gossip about strange omnibus drivers. As if living out of suitcases with their land gone and their friends killed had perked them up. But the letters came so rarely, and their absence, this daily reminder of their absence ached like a wound.

She pictured the charred field where their hacienda had been. It was a distinct vision, yet inaccurate. According to her father, the north wall still stood. But she pictured a field, completely leveled, rubble still smoldering. If she lingered over the details, the vision became falser yet: blackened hulks of industrial machinery, bleeding rabbits caught on barbed wire, pineapples rotting in the sun, the pope-blessed sword of Don Xavier. The rabbits were due to James, a passage that he’d written about no-man’s-land that had become engraved in her mind. A zone where nothing but thick smoke, at times black, at times white, gives appearance of life … a form going over this desert land something after the manner of a rabbit … a hero. His language had acquired a brutality that hadn’t been there in Washington. She’d watched it, through sheets of newsprint, grow tougher and tougher the longer he stayed there.

No one else was there to collect mail. Just her. Sam Mathews put down the pomegranate he’d been eating, licked the juice from his fingers, and grinned.

“Happy to see me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He disappeared below the counter, then reappeared, and handed her a large brown package. “Take this away, it’s crowding my space.”

“What is it?”

“The trumpet, I think. From Col. McFindley & Co.”

She had forgotten. Tiny Henderson had earned a trumpet for winning the spelling bee, and she’d promised to deliver it in person. “Anything else?” she asked. Sam ambled over to the mail slots. Really ambled. Or if there was a word that meant moving in a slower and more purposeless way than ambling, then that was it. “Well?”

“Plenty of papers,” he said. He leafed through the Times, the local broadsheets and stock reports. “Nothing from Mexico. Didn’t your mother send you something last week?” She nodded. “I haven’t heard of any serious fighting since.”

“I know. Thank goodness,” she said.

“You want some pomegranate?”

She smiled. No. She put the papers in her satchel and picked up the package from Col. McFindley & Co. “I guess I’ll take this over to the Hendersons’.”

“Wait,” Sam said, putting his finger up to his nose. “You did get something else, where did I put it?”

“From Mexico?”

“No, no,” Sam replied, crouching out of view again. “I had it on the trumpet to show you, didn’t want it to get lost in the shuffle.” He chuckled. “Here it is.” A weathered envelope with many stamps. “From France.”

“From France?” she repeated stupidly.

“Look,” he said, and pointed at a tiny sketch of a car in the bottom corner of the envelope. “Pretty good, isn’t it? I liked that.”

“I’m sure you did.” She took the envelope and stared at it. James had never written to her before. “Well,” she said, feeling like she had been standing there too long. She flashed Sam a smile. “Well.”

She left without the trumpet, had to go back and get it, then went two blocks past the Henderson house before she realized what she had done. She hitched the horse and stood there for a moment, smoothing her skirt. James had sent Christmas greetings to her and Owen, birthday cards to Victoria, but never, not once in ten years, anything only for her. She didn’t know if she wanted him to, couldn’t help but feel that a personal correspondence would be disappointing. But of course she was pleased. She took the envelope out of her bag and pored over it. In the center was her name, Mrs. Dolores X.T. Scraperton, written in script that looked more cramped than she’d remembered. In the top right corner, a small standard-issue stamp said, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité; next to it, a larger one with a pale brown engraving of a lion statue and a banner that read, Orphelins de la guerre. But it couldn’t be bad news, not with the sketch of the car.

That Darracq. She thought of it more often than she thought of James. She thought of it whenever she got frustrated with the Stanley Steamer, its immense power, the air in her face, the steering wheel vibrating, the trees a blur. Or stationary, its elegant curves, its creamy, haughty whiteness, the mechanical reality of its insides. That night outside Benjamin and Clara’s with the engine gleaming wetly under the misty streetlamps. But that wasn’t solely a Darracq recollection—James was there too, handing her tools as she struggled to keep the stole wrapped around her. Chain. Jack. Vulcanizer. The blessed car fading, and James’s face coming closer, his eyes bright in the mist. The tools kept coming. They’d paused at each moment of transfer, their flesh pressed to jointly grasped metal. Oil squirt can. Grease gun. A moment of what she imagined seasickness to feel like. A stab of guilt. And pleasure, pleasure, pleasure everywhere.

She grabbed the trumpet and hurried to the Hendersons’. Tiny Henderson was twelve years old and had won the spelling bee with vertiginous. She banged through the gate, squeezing the trumpet to her chest. Laundry hung in the front, white and dripping. She wanted to grab a sheet off the line and wrap herself up in it. She stopped and chided herself and reviewed the Hendersons in her mind. Mr. Henderson manned the pumps in Shaft 8. Mrs. Henderson chaired the Pristina Festivities Committee. Their two oldest sons were already working, one in Owen’s office, the other, she thought, did something in the new coal mine. They had Tiny—real name, Ted—who knew how to spell, and a baby girl, colicky. As if on cue, from inside the baby bawled. Dolores knocked. Mrs. Henderson, hair in disarray, child in massive, freckled arm, opened the door.

“Mrs. Scraperton!” she said, flustered, dismayed, exceedingly apologetic.

Dolores lifted up the package. “For the spelling champ!” The baby screamed.

“Ted’s at baseball practice,” Mrs. Henderson yelled over the baby. “He won’t be back for an hour.”

Dolores cooed at the red wrinkled creature in Mrs. Henderson’s arm, not wanting to be alone with the dripping laundry and the letter. Luckily the baby’s sobs became more bearable and Dolores was invited indoors. She settled down at the kitchen table and told Mrs. Henderson that the Mercury frieze had arrived and the building looked almost done. Mrs. Henderson listened with some interest. Her committee was in charge of planning the opening festivities for the new HQ. But no one, she complained, had told them when the building would be finished, and how could they be expected to plan when they hadn’t been given a definite date? What’s more, she said, as she poured the coffee, no one had specified what kind of party—Class A or Class B. If it was Class A, they needed fireworks, and those took forever to order. The whole thing was most disorganized.

Dolores sipped her coffee without tasting it. Her senses were concentrated in her fingertips, and her fingertips were smoothing her bag. She hadn’t expected him to write, not even that first year. The day of the boys’ attack, he had been the one to save Victoria and drive them to the hospital, but she hadn’t been aware of him, only the heaviness of Victoria’s head on her lap, the growing red stain on her skirt, the strange silence mixed with gasps. When things came into focus and normal rhythm, she had been in the hospital room, Owen’s fingers tight on her shoulder. He had smelled of cigars, which was odd for him, but he had just been in a club. She had burrowed into his suit, trying to lose herself in tobacco and wool. Who knows how long it took before she realized that there was someone else in the room. A dandy in striped trousers. A stranger. James. He had recognized her not recognizing him. Afterward, she had wanted to say something to him, to try to erase that moment. But she hadn’t.

Tiny, flushed from practice, stood in front of her, holding out a tooth that hung from a cord around his neck.

“What’s that?” Dolores said.

“Panther incisor,” he replied, thrusting out his chin. “Curr and I trapped it in the mountains.” His mother made a noise in her throat. “Well, Curr did. But I told him where to put the trap.”

Dolores presented him with the package. He tore off the brown paper and got to a handsome case lined with red velvet. Mrs. Henderson clapped as he put the trumpet to his lips. He experimented with a couple of notes before plunging into an ear-splitting rendition of “O Pristina!” Dolores tried to look appreciative, but found herself jumping up and leaving in an awkward rush.

She forced her horse to canter. She would have liked him to gallop, but the heat was too much. Still, there was motion, her skirt flapping, air sneaking down her collar. She wondered at herself, this excitement over a man who, after all, she barely knew. Perhaps it was only that. Not knowing. She knew where she was. The sky, huge and hot, the dusty, flat horizon. The taste of the water, the smell of the smoke. The crease in Owen’s neck, the slightest bit of extra skin that had gathered round his belly, evidence of a newfound appreciation for cream. She knew it so well. At home, Cerb’rus panted in a hole he’d dug in the middle of the yard. He thumped his tail lazily when he saw her. She knew everything. The dog’s breath, the cost of the electric mine trams, the number of girls Ysidro had kissed. She stopped midtrack, freshly incensed at the idea of Victoria working so closely with him. What had Owen been thinking? She told Hedda to make her something heavy and solid for dinner.

“What, ma’am?”

“Something that will put me to sleep.”

Hedda, nonplussed, opened the pantry door and stared at the contents. Dolores went to her room, took the envelope from her bag, and lay it on her desk. She didn’t open it. She thought about Owen, enthralled by Victoria, watching Indians shuffle on some godforsaken mesa. She organized the piles of bills and notes and catalogs into neat rectangles, readjusted the vase of dried flowers, and came across a cinnabar crystal shoved back in the corner of the desk. A long-ago gift from Owen. She picked up the crystal and held it to the light. The prisms glowed a deep burgundy—glasslike, perfect, smooth. They didn’t seem to belong to the rough rock at their base. She thought, not for the first time, that she ought to line the base with felt, so that it wouldn’t scratch the surface of her desk. She put it down, gently. He had given it to her during their courtship. She had left it back in Coahuila, but her mother had sent it when they evacuated. It had come in a package that didn’t have a note, just a bunch of nonsense things, a porcelain perfume dispenser with a pink airbag, old bronze keys, an unmatched sock. She wondered if her mother had inadvertently sent her a box intended for the trash, or if had she been too busy, madly packing buttons, ladles, family photographs, to notice what she’d chosen to save, apportion, abandon.

Hedda rang the dinner bell.

“Coming!” Dolores shouted.

She stared back at James’s envelope, crumpled it in her fingers, then tossed it in the bin.

“Coming right now!” she cried, her voice strong with resolve.

She made it to the door before she slunk back and fished the envelope out.

Dear Dolores,

Paris isn’t how we planned. I am alone with a broken arm (nothing heroic, I tripped when drunk) and learning to write with my left hand. I have never written to anyone with my left hand before, you are the first person, perhaps because I never dared with my right. I have learned how to fly and I want to teach you some day, not a balloon though. They have balloons with machine guns and they are no good at all. An aeroplane, but not a military one, a sweet june bug with canvas wings and a rip-roaring engine.

Always,

James

The handwriting was shaky. She wondered if he’d been drunk when he wrote it as well. She stood there staring at the paragraph, floating in a sea of off-white. Her knees wobbled. She sat on the bed, a great silence all around her. Downstairs Hedda called her for dinner but the sound was so faint it hardly registered.