He dug some Pacifico beers from a bin of cubed ice and gulped those while I ate hot flour tortillas, scoops of gua- camole and sour cream.

When he’d finished his beers, Raf managed a few bites of chicken in chocolate sauce, two spoonfuls of black bean soup.

“Now what happens?” I said.

“You mean we’re all done fucking around, Paige?” he said.

There was music from overhead: a plinking guitar and swaying fiddles.

“Why did you leave me, Raf?”

Behind the fiddle sounds, the guitar was doing something like high math.

“I wasn’t leaving you,” he said. “I had to see Raymond’s why I ended up here. He’s helped me before; scraped me off a couple other walls.”

“How? Who is he?”

“Old friend. We were schoolmates.”

“Oh, uh huh. Was that at Princeton or when you were reading at Oxford? Don’t even tell me, I don’t want to hear.”

“Cute girl behind the counter,” Raf said eventually.

She had been cute when we pushed through the entrance door and she was cute now. She had a nice back and her stupid dress showed all of it.

“Everything a boy could want,” I said and sighed.

Raf let smoke trail from his mouth.

Because of his glass eye, his gaze could go off in two directions and someone confronting him who wasn’t used to this had to guess.

But I knew where Raf was focused. His quiet smile was aimed at me while his working eye worked over the bared back of the counter girl.

We drove out an eight-lane highway—the Old Spanish Trail, it was called—toward the Astrodome. I saw L.A.–type blight: Wal-Marts, a thousand fast fooderies, convenience stores.

A bank sign eighty feet aloft flashed us the temperature in computer digitals: 103° F.

“Turn up here,” Raf told me.

Now we were passing grand homes with deep shade and broad lawns of jewel-green Bermuda grass.

“Next block, go right, on through the iron gates,” he said.

We rode a meandering drive on the grounds of a Catholic convent. Shadows splattered everywhere over the yards and banks of flowers. There were white statues, luminous on their pedestals.

The radio’s weather announcer said hurricane winds were hammering the Grenadines, that a thunderstorm was drenching the Panhandle.

Where we were, though—before the brick convent building—curtains of bright rain fell. The sun was out, but the rain came down as if thrown from lawn sprinklers.

Raf said, “Let me just light this cigarette.”

An Archangel Michael, twice life-sized, stood guardian before the convent’s door. I watched a nun in a blue dress and hood as she went running for him.

And I saw a tiny orange-and-yellow lizard flicker up a cottonwood tree.

Raf inhaled and said, “Now. I swear to you, before God here and all his angels and virgins and shit, that I mean to clean up, dry out . . .”