The jeep was still by the pump. He ran past the Reyeses’ house to the outhouses, but she wasn’t there. On his way back he noticed a freestanding shadow in the night, a pillar of smoke braided with embers rising from the Reyeses’ yard. Sitting on chairs on either side of a fire were Anna and Sophie Reyes, talking in voices too low to carry.

Sophie was Ben’s wife and Dolores’ almost mute sister, so shy that she was practically a family secret. Except for the pots her nieces sold under the portal in Santa Fe, Joe doubted that anyone outside Santiago would ever have known she existed. She had cropped hair streaked black and white, a soft, hesitant face, and wore a smudged apron outside the traditional one-shoulder dress and cotton shirt. The fire was the smothered variety, cow chips heaped on burning wood to turn the pots in the center of the fire a carbon-rich black. He didn’t know which was more unlikely: that Sophie would be firing pots in the middle of the night or that she would speak to Anna.

The two women watched him let himself in through the gate. “I couldn’t sleep,” Anna whispered.

They each held blackened sticks, as if they’d been tending the fire in a desultory fashion during their conversation. Pots already fired were stacked on charred racks to one side of the yard. Raw pots of different shapes lined the other side. Ears of corn, strings of chilies and dried camomile hung in the striped moon-shadows of a ramada at the back of the house. By the chairs were tin pails of temper and shards and fresh clay in twists of newspaper.

“What are you doing?” Joe asked.

“You can see what I’m doing.” Sophie leaned back in her chair the better to regard him. He didn’t remember his aunt’s gaze as being quite so direct.

“In the dark?”

“It’s light enough. I was lonely. It’s good she came by. She talks quietly. That’s nice. We don’t wake anyone up.”

“It’s cold.”

“Then go back to bed,” Sophie said.

He ignored the suggestion. Besides, it was warm around the smothered, nearly invisible fire.

“You have a good woman,” Sophie said. “She thinks up numbers.”

“She’s a mathematician.”

“That’s what I said. Like Thinking Woman.”

“Thinking Woman?” Anna asked.

“Thinking Woman thought up the world,” Joe said. “Her thoughts became land, animals, people. Whatever she thought became real.”

“Like you.” Sophie tapped Anna’s stick with her own. “His other women were all sluts.”

“Thanks,” Joe said.

“That came from leaving here and going to New York and the Army,” Sophie told Anna. She looked up at him and demanded, “Why did you go into the Army?”

“Yes, Joe,” Anna asked. “Why did you?”

This night-blooming conversation was unreal, he thought. “It’s complicated.”