“Three years?” Pancho said. “Shame on you, Charlie.”

“Go easy on Charlie, Pancho,” Arch said. “She kept it very quiet. I didn’t even know myself until very recently, and Charlie’s stepdad is my father-in-law. But we were great friends before all of that.”

“So the two of you are stepbrothers-in-law, but you were friends before,” Pancho said. “There must be a story.”

“It’s a long one,” I said.

“Do tell,” Pancho said.

“I’d rather not.”

“If you won’t tell, I’ll just ask Archer,” Pancho said. “You’ll tell us all about it, won’t you, Archer?”

“I’m an open book,” Arch said.

“Save it for the table,” Teddy said from the kitchen. “Dinner is served.”

Looking back, I wish I’d savored the taste of Mariela’s family mole, a recipe handed down for hundreds of years. Instead, I ate little and gulped the fine wine Pancho and Murray had brought as if it were cheap sangria.

“So, Arch,” Pancho said, “tell us about Nashville.”

“Well, it isn’t all honky-tonks and ten-gallon hats,” he said. “But you must know that from Charlie and Teddy.”

“I almost forgot,” Pancho said. “You lived there as well, didn’t you, Teddy? But not long.”

“Less than a year,” Teddy said. “I barely remember it.”

“You wouldn’t recognize it if you did,” Arch said.

He regaled the table with tales of Nashville old and new. I was too drunk to remember anything but the way they looked at him, the way they hung on his words, the way his beauty and his charm captivated them all. It was enormously confusing to sit there knowing that my mother was across the border in Tennessee dying—perhaps already dead, for all I knew—and there I was being overtaken again by Arch—the sound of his laughter, his easy manner, the flash of mischief in his eyes, the way he could simultaneously enthrall both two gay men and two lesbians who usually regarded wealthy gringos like Arch with a suspicion bordering on hostility.

When Murray began to fade, Arch and I helped Pancho get him out to the car.

“Will I see you in the morning?” Pancho asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll call when I get there.”

“Lo siento, mi hijo,” he said. “Te amamos.”

“Y tu tambien.”

When I came back in, Arch and Teddy and Mariela had moved into the living room. Mariela spread out across the length of one couch, the hem of her dress pulled up over her knees, Teddy curled up next to her. Arch sat in a club chair admiring the two of them with a faint leer, which, against all reason, engendered a pang of jealousy in me.

“Well, bud,” I said, “we have an early morning.”

Arch glanced at his watch.

“Indeed we do,” he said.

I led him to the door, then stepped out onto the curb and hailed a cab. Arch buttoned his blazer.

“Don’t forget your passport.”

“I’ll be ready,” I said.