Sometimes I thought Elizaveta and I would have made a good couple had I not been engaged to Pita, and she not seeing Jesus. She was smart, fun, cheeky—my type, I suppose. I felt guilty when I caught myself contemplating the two of us together, but they were thoughts, that was all, I couldn’t control them. I had never cheated on Pita, and I never would.

“Is your head okay?” Elizaveta asked me, frowning at the bandage on my forehead.

I lifted my baseball cap and ran a hand through my hair. “I’m fine,” I told her.

“What happened?” Pepper asked.

“He tried jumping from balcony to swimming pool last night and fell,” Elizaveta said. “See, he is crazy.”

“I agree with Eliza,” Pepper said. “Anyone who chooses to drive a car around a track filled with other cars at two hundred miles an hour has to be crazy.”

I switched the topic and said, “So this place is pretty spectacular. I had no idea it would be so busy.”

“Weekdays aren’t,” Pepper said. “But weekends, yes, especially Sunday.”

“So which one is our boat?”

We turned to face the canal, the gondolas lining the bank. With their garish colors and kitsch decorations, they were the amphibious equivalent to the Filipino Jeepney. Pepper pointed to the one directly before us. “Lupita” was painted on the back arch.

“What’s up with the female names?” I asked.

“Some refer to someone special,” Pepper said. “Maybe a wife or a daughter. But some, I think, are just the name of the boat.”

“I never knew there was anywhere so green in Mexico City.”

“We call Xochimilco the lungs of the city. Xochimilco means ‘flower fields.’ Wait until you see some of the chinampas. They are beautiful.”

I frowned. “Chin what?”

“The island gardens that separate the canals. The Aztecs made them.”

“To grow flowers?”

“And other crops. There used to be many more chinampas, but after the Spanish invasion, and the lakes dried up, these canals are all that remain.”

I looked at Pepper skeptically. “Lakes?”

“Oh my, Jack,” he said. “Didn’t you know Mexico City was once surrounded by five lakes?”

“I had no idea.”

“You Americans,” Elizaveta said.

“You knew?” I asked her.

“Of course. I am Russian, and Russians are not ignorant Americans. I learn about the country where I choose to live.”

I rolled my eyes. “So where did the lakes go?” I asked Pepper, still not sure he wasn’t having me on. “How did they just dry up—?”

“There he is!” a voice called from behind us, cutting off my question. “Mr. Days of Thunder himself!”

I turned to find Jesus and Pita approaching—along with Jesus’s new best friend, Nitro.

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