Ken was waiting for them on the dirt strip that served as an airfield, lounging in the driver’s seat of the hotel’s Jeep with a book in one hand and a beer in the other. He was tanned the color of a walnut and he’d let his crew cut grow out. The last time she’d seen him he was in chinos and a baby-blue button-down shirt, and now he was bare-chested, wearing nothing but his sunglasses, a pair of athletic shorts and the sandals they called huaraches, as if he’d already gone native. Which he had. They all had. And she and Fitz and Corey would too, just give them time, and wasn’t that the whole point? As soon as the propellers stopped whirling and a pair of dark little men fixed the stairway in place, he sauntered across the field to greet them even as the door swung open and she was hit with a blast of heat that was like no heat she’d ever known, alien heat, Mexican heat that was propped up on a solid wall of sweetness and stench in equal proportions, jasmine, sewage, cookery, rot. Just to take a breath was a kind of synesthesia.

“Hey, amigo,” he called out, taking Fitz by the hand and pulling him close for a back-thumping embrace. “Bienvenidos a México. This place is the real deal—paradise on earth, and you are going to love it, believe me.” Then he turned to her and swept her up in his arms, whirling her around as if they were on ice skates. “Paradise,” he kept saying in her ear, his breath like a hot salve, “really and truly and veritably!”

And then it was Corey’s turn. Ken set her down and they were all grinning, everybody, even the Mexicans, and he held out his hand solemnly to Corey for a handshake. “And you know what else?” he asked, his voice riding up the register as if it could scarcely be believed, one marvel after another. “Richie caught a scorpion the size of a tamale last night. You know what a tamale is?”

Corey shook his head. “Like a hot tamale?”

“Yeah, exactly: a hot tamale.”

“How big?”

Ken stretched out his hands as if he were approximating the length of a prize fish.

“You mean Richard?” Corey asked.

Ken shot her a look, still grinning. “Yeah, Richard—isn’t that what I said?”

“You said ‘Richie.’”

The smells seemed to intensify, reinforced now by the chemical assault of the airplane fuel. Richard was Ronald’s twin brother and Corey’s closest friend among the other children, and he was Richard, not Richie or Rick, as a way of distinguishing himself from his father, she supposed—and, given that, Ronald had had no chance of being Ronnie or Ron even if he’d wanted to.