“Hey. What’s up?” she asks him. He cocks his head, which has a hat strapped to it, something like a fez. She checks out his situation. On the plus side, he probably has a steady supply of taco chips, and humans to amuse him. Still, there is the chain—one end wrapped around the tree trunk, the other clamped to one of his ankles, where it has rubbed away the fur around it. Mexico is, in general, a place with a lot of potential for an animal rights movement. She brings water to the thirsty, exhausted dogs that drag themselves around everywhere here. A metal bowl sits at the base of the tree, but it’s empty. She gets up to ask for a glass of water at the bar, but her father, on his way back to the table, says, “You can’t resolve this particular problem. I may have mentioned this before.” He pulls out the metal chair across the small table from her; the tips of its legs scrape through the gravel on the ground. “There isn’t enough water to satisfy the thirst of the dogs and cats, not to mention the monkeys in this patch of the world.” Her father, she has noticed, has a slight deficiency in empathy. When he tries, it comes off as an impersonation.

“I can do a little.” When she has gone up to the bar and come back with a glass of water, she pours it into the bowl beneath the tree.

Alan looks away. When he looks back, he asks her about the play.

“The playwright and director are kind of geniuses. The play is very good. If it takes off, a lot of people will see my work. Even better—they’ll see what I can do with more than a twenty-dollar budget.” She dips a taco chip into an earthenware bowl of salsa, bites into it, and her mouth explodes. After drinking the beer pretty much straight down, she’s able to speak again, and then only in a crackle. “I suppose this is probably my big break. Of course, I’m trying not to frame it that way. I can scare myself silly.”

“Has your mother dismissed it yet?”

“I haven’t told her. As a general practice I don’t ever tell her anything really good.”

“Ricky loved you, you know. I’m sure it’s hard to imagine now, but at the beginning she was enthralled by you. She used to sit you on her lap and inspect your ears, your toes. And she’d say to me, ‘She’s perfect.’ And then everything else happened. Not just the accident, not just that you’d become imperfect in her eyes. The bigger problem was that you started having ideas of your own. Ideas different from hers. She had to punish you for that. And it was, of course, a losing battle.”