“Well, Volkswagen has a presence in the area. Nobody wants the plant to leave. I like to think that working for the company, driving a VW, is a kind of carapace we’re traveling inside. And of course, it helps that neither you nor I are involved in the drug wars. Did you remember to move money out of your checking account like I told you? If you get express-kidnapped, they’ll only keep you until the ATM runs dry.” Statements like this are the closest her father gets to humor, if he’s being humorous.

“Seriously,” he says because he knows what she’s thinking.

Cate gropes around for a snappy answer, but she can’t find an offhand way to reveal (although she knows he probably suspects) that her checking account is her entire savings, an amount that would require only two or three modest ATM withdrawals to deplete entirely.

Cate sees her father at Christmastime and usually for a week in the summer. He and Ricky split up when Cate was a freshman in high school, a few years after the workshop accident. It could seem from the right distance as though her injury and his departure were unrelated. But the life of their small family thinned out after the mishap, the air in the house moved to a higher altitude, the noise of daily life became muted. This turned out to be the ghostly period during which her father was preparing for his absence.

The workshop project was just for fun—something she and her father would make together, a wooden silhouette of Cate to fasten to the kitchen doorframe. They decided to make it a foot taller than her current height. They made a best guess. The plan was to pencil-mark her height on the cutout as she grew. They were going to paint it with hair (black), face (pink), a blue-and-white striped shirt she especially liked, jeans, sneakers. They never got to the painting part. The jigsawed board was slippery with blood, then she never saw it again.

Because of the accident, because she had to live the last installment of her childhood without him, her father has become a somewhat distant relative—attentive in her presence, happy to see her, interested in catching up, but the connection has become faltering, sputtering, a call between two valleys on either side of a high mountain.

At the bar, which is mostly outside, tables on dusty ground, he orders beers for both of them, then heads for the john, which stands at not quite enough distance to keep the smell discreet, its door hanging open. The waiter brings two Tecates, the bottles feverishly sweating. Cate takes a long drink and, in tilting her head back slightly, sees the monkey. He is sitting on a branch midway up a dusty tree at a near edge of the patio. He is eating a piece of tortilla with a rapid burst of munching.