I finished my beer and it felt like nothing.

“Raymond used to be the best non-Latino man I ever knew,” Jewels said. “That’s when he was drinking. Now between Luisa, and the church, and AA . . . They’ve made him a robot. What’s the point of him even living?”

She vanished again, and suddenly I didn’t mind being here. I cracked a second beer.

Jewels had lit a few of the novena candles, and the winds from the wagging fans played with the candle flames, sending them sideways every five seconds.

I unbagged a pen and my poetry notebook. Just words, I listed at first, but then I got a start on a tercet. This tercet, if a student had submitted it to me, would’ve earned a low C.

I reeled over and whomped cheerily on the bathroom door. “Jewels! How’s the water?”

She said, “I’m glad you waited. I can go to Facinita with you. I won’t need no ride home and you’ll feel better if you’re with someone.”

I wanted to go alone, though. I wanted to get drunker, go alone, and the hell with a bra.

“What’ll we do, leave a note for Raf and them?”

“Good thinking,” Jewels called. “In case they decide to crash-land.”

“Do you have any more of that beer?” I asked her.

“Sí,” she said. “In the kitchen in the fridge compartment. Then how ’bout soaping my back for me?”

“Not this month, Jewels. Sorry.”

“Texans are very friendly. You oughta get more friendly, Paige.”

“Do I still get the beer?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. I heard the squeak of her bottom as she realigned herself in the tub.

“Jewels?”

“Just help your ole fuckin’ self,” she said.

Facinita had probably been a bowling alley. It was a long, low unmarked building behind an acre of parking lot lighted bright as noon by security floods. A strip of stubby palms like giant pineapples lined up along the base of the façade. Shiny loud cars were patrolling.

Jewels had come in a dress right for an afternoon bride—pastry white, crisp, lacy. Her lips and eyelids were painted purple. “Muerte—very sensual,” she told me.

The dance crowd here was excited, extravagantly sharped up.

Inside, little lights flashed through cellophane red gel. The music was salsa; the floor bouncing full.

Jewels spoke quick, liquid Spanish, pretty to my ears. She knew everyone. She hooked a tall boy who wore a suit that glinted like minnows.

When he talked, I overheard the sound “Huh-reeba”—Jewels’s sister.

“Well, goddamn. Bingo,” Jewels shouted. “They’re here somewhere!”

“Where are the bars?” I asked.

She winked; nodded left.

I saw Raf.

He was bent over, his nose and mouth in the dark mane of a girl twenty years younger than he. Whatever he was saying made the young woman smile, shake her head no, smile again.