He flung out a hand at me, a wave of some kind—assent, dismissal?—I couldn’t tell, because he continued into the house, an effective brush-off. He knew a lot, Pastor Andrés did, about Billy, about the chavos banda of the neighborhood, about Fly the Flag, most of all about right and wrong: it was better for me to mind my own business, he’d said, not to meddle with any of it, which meant to me that he knew why Frank Zamar didn’t want the police involved in exploring the sabotage at the plant.

I walked back to my own car. Should I leave it alone? I should. I didn’t have the time or the desire to look into it. And maybe if Andrés hadn’t told me an unmarried woman shouldn’t know or talk about sex, I would have left it alone. I tripped on a piece of concrete and did a kind of cartwheel to keep from going over completely.

I wished my Spanish were better. It’s similar to Italian, so I can follow it, but I don’t speak Italian often enough these days for either language to stay fresh in my mind. I had a feeling Andrés knew this chavo banda better than just from seeing him around the neighborhood; I had a feeling Andrés specifically didn’t want me to see him with this chavo. Next week, I’d make it a little project, to try to find out who this particular punk was.

At practice that afternoon, I couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to the game. Josie, in particular, was like a cat on a hot shovel. I figured the load of domestic responsibilities her mother had dumped on her must be getting to her, but it didn’t make working with her easier. I called a halt to scrimmage twenty minutes early and could hardly wait for them to get out of the showers before taking off myself.

Billy the Kid phoned me as I was leaving Coach McFarlane’s house. He wouldn’t tell me where he was; in fact, he would barely talk to me at all.

“I thought I could trust you, Ms. War-sha-sky, but then you go and start working for my father, and on top of that you bothered Pastor Andrés. I’m an adult, I can take care of myself. You have to promise to stop looking for me.”

“I can’t make such a sweeping promise, Billy. If you don’t want your dad to know where you are, I guess that’s a reasonable request, as long as I can assure him you’re not being held somewhere against your will.”

His breath came heavily over the phone to me. “I haven’t been kidnapped or anything like that. Now promise me.”