And then maybe, on the way home, she’d drown her. All right, so she was young, smart, beautiful; Jane had no resentment about that, or none that she couldn’t control. But Jane had considered herself Chloe’s mentor, had spent what undoubtedly amounted to hours helping her shape and refine some of her ideas.

Waitress Lucy leaned over the table to retrieve Tim’s empty cereal bowl. “What gets me,” she said, “is that they come in and ruin Miami so you can’t even live there, and then they start marching up this way, as if we don’t have enough problems with crowding already.”

Tim was trying to get an ice cube unstuck from the bottom of his glass, pounding the bottom of it with the side of his fist. And which of the generally shallow ideas of Chloe’s had the station grabbed at? “I’m sorry?” Jane asked the waitress. “What did you say?”

“They don’t want to learn English, so we’ve got to spend millions putting up signs in Spanish.” Lucy had the plates and silverware expertly stacked on her arm. Jane didn’t know what crucial piece of her non sequiturial monologue she’d missed, but it sounded like some narrow-minded rant. The waitress motioned with her shoulder toward the cash register where Chloe was slowly turning the rack of postcards. “And look at her,” she said, “all done up in that costume, like a spic whore.”

The angry diatribe Jane was composing in her head came to a screeching halt. Had she heard correctly? She couldn’t remember when or where she’d last heard a slur of this kind tossed off in what she’d assumed to be polite conversation, and the naked ugliness of it was like a blow. The last minute fell into place: ruin Miami, learning English, overcrowding. Nausea again gripped her stomach. Tim turned and waved at Chloe.

“Sorry,” the waitress said. “I didn’t know she was a friend of yours.”

“That isn’t the point,” Jane said.

Tim started to jiggle his skinny legs; Jane could feel the floor under her feet shaking. “Yeah, and she’s not Puerto Rican.”

“And that isn’t the point either!” Jane said. “Assuming it’s all right to say that in front of us, whether we know her or not! As if we were as racist as you are.”

“Yeah. Whatever.” Lucy picked up Tim’s dirty napkin and walked off.

Chloe clomped to the booth on her big, thick sandals and shooed Tim over on the banquette. “Have you guys heard about the storm? They might get something like half a foot of rain here.”