I didn’t know how to answer. I wanted to say “Of course I will. It will be only a month or two, and I’ll come back flush with cash, and life will go on as it was before.” Or that I just needed a little time to make peace with the past, to make sense of what I was feeling. To hang around long enough to remember that Arch and Vanessa hadn’t needed me before and didn’t need me now. To realize that the life I had in Mexico was enough—more than enough; better than I deserved. That San Miguel was home; that I knew what was gripping me was just nostalgia, but I needed to feel it and see it through to the end so I could go back without regrets. But I knew if I said those things, they would just be what I wanted to be true, and not what was. So I said nothing, which was the same, it seems, as saying yes.

“I need to take a shower,” she said. “I’ve been sweating like a pig all day.”

The next day, Teddy, Pancho, and Murray went back to Mexico.

After two months, I received a box containing some clothes and a few other things I’d left behind, along with a single black-and-white photograph Teddy had taken of me in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat. On the back, she’d written: Carlitos, como lo recordaré. Charlie, as I’ll remember him.

eight

The last week of May, Arch gave the commencement address at Yeatman—an eerie echo of my own graduation. Arch knew what a powerful platform the lectern at a Yeatman commencement could be: a captive audience, which included many of the city’s most affluent and influential citizens. He was not naïve to the length of his odds.

Arch’s sole experience in politics had been a term on the school board, where his most memorable accomplishment had been a concerted effort to blow the whole thing up. Citing “irreconcilable dysfunction” and “well-intentioned but incompetent” members, Arch had sent a letter to the mayor’s office and the news media, calling for a resolution to disband the elected school board and return to a system where the mayor appointed representatives of his own choosing.

“Speaking as one myself, I believe our school board representatives want what’s best for our young people,” Arch had written in the letter. “But as a whole, we lack the experience, expertise, and available time to accomplish our aims.”

Off the record, he’d been blunt: “It was an idiot circus,” he told me, “run by some of the stubbornest jackasses who ever stumbled out of the barn.”