Gaspar had managed to guide Adela away from the house on Villarreal in a detour that had taken them back to the front door of his own house. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, he felt creeped out by the abandoned house, and he’d already heard Adela suggest that maybe they could sneak inside. An adventure, a visit to the neighborhood haunted house. Gaspar didn’t think that sounded at all fun. He was hungry, but he couldn’t invite Adela in to eat: he was forbidden from having guests over unannounced. The bike locked up to the bars outside gave him an idea.

“Have you eaten?”

Adela said she wasn’t very hungry after the cake and hot dogs. That’s how girls are, thought Gaspar, they don’t like to eat: so weird. He was always hungry, and his guy friends were too.

“Well, if you don’t want to eat you can still come with me. Let’s go to Curva, okay?”

“Yeah, I could eat a slice of pizza,” said Adela.

“Hop on.”

Gaspar adjusted his belt: he’d grown thinner and his pants were falling off him.

“Why don’t you buy a belt your own size?” Adela laughed, and Gaspar said he always forgot.

“It’s my dad’s, that’s why it’s so long. Do I look like a clown?”

“No,” she replied. “I don’t know why, but it looks really good on you.”

Adela climbed on to the footrests on either side of the back wheel. That way she could ride standing up, holding on to Gaspar’s shoulder. She asked him to go fast, to pedal hard, and since there was no one in the street, Gaspar did, and he took the long way to the pizzeria so she’d have more time to enjoy the speed and the wind in her hair.

There were many stories about the house on Calle Villarreal, though not all of the stories were told. One day Haydee, the wife of Turi the grocer, had told her customers about the owners. She said they’d been an old couple who lived alone without help from anyone, no nurses, no children around, and they went crazy in there. Old-people crazy: senile dementia. The old lady, when someone went by the house, would go to the window and open her mouth as if she were screaming, but didn’t scream. Then she’d run away. Sometimes she was naked. The old man was much more placid, but he refused to take the trash out. One day someone had come—a relative or social worker—and hauled away bags of stuff, mostly rotten food, while the old man sat in the front yard—which in those days had a plant or two—and cried, muttering about how “they would find him now, now they would.”

Turi said he hadn’t heard that story, but he did know that when the old woman had died, they found her in bed with two cat skeletons beside her, one on the sheet, the other on the pillow. The owner of the restaurant in the park mostly corroborated that story, except he was sure the cat skeletons were around the refrigerator, which was full of mold and old cold cuts and unopened loaves of sliced bread.