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of Shakespeare’s plays held against her stomach. A half-full Corona was in her left hand. Atticus forced himself to turn his head away, and Renata tightened her robe. She asked, “You look in on his friends?”
    â€œHad a peek. Which one was Eduardo?”
    She was surprised. “You’ve got a good memory. The guy in the Padres cap, I think.” She took a mouthful of beer and chilled her neck with the bottle. “Scott would go out to theirshacks in the barrio , feed on their fried dog meat and iguanas, get horribly sick with their sicknesses, and then go out there again with their next invitation. He said they made him an honorary Mayan.” She smiled. “You don’t suppose it’s possible that it was all sarcasm on their part, do you?”
    â€œWell, he always was a friendly kid.”
    She fell into a reverie as she said, “And he’d try just about anything.”
    â€œWhat is it downstairs, some kind of a wake?”
    â€œI hear they pretend a friend has played a good trick on the world and they party like they’re in on the joke.” She drank some beer and held the bottle on the mattress. “Their funerals take place a year later when they rebury the body. And then they howl with sadness.”
    Atticus looked at a clock by her bed. After two. “Well, morning comes awful early,” he said.
    â€œYou know what the name Atticus means? Scott told me. Simplicity, purity, and intelligence.”
    â€œAlways making things up, that kid.”
    â€œYou two are so interesting. You’re the formidable figure he idolized and struggled not to become, and he’s who you’d be if you didn’t have all your good habits and rules and boundaries.”
    â€œI forgot. You studied psychology.”
    Renata flushed and put a hand to her face. “I just realized: I was using the present tense.”
    â€œHard not to,” he said.
    She focused on him and then on her book. “Shall I read to you?” She took his silence as permission, and she beautifullyread from Shakespeare’s King John : “‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.’” Renata closed the book and her brown eyes sorrowed as she recited, “‘Then have I reason to be fond of Grief.’”

THREE
    Atticus walked out to the pool in his pajamas with hot coffee in a cup. The terra-cotta tiles were cool against his feet, but the salt air was as warm as it is in a parlor of tall windows. A gray freighter was just in sight, forcing its way so slowly it seemed stopped, and a fishing boat with Americans in sunglasses on board was angling out into the Gulf Stream. Along the salt white beaches, Mexican boys in hotel jackets were kicking out deck chairs and cranking open big umbrellas and putting out the red plastic flags that warned of the undertow with the word peligroso. A swallow flew across the yard and alighted on an upstairs railing. The swallow cocked its head to the right, jabbed a half-smoked cigarette out of an ashtray up there, and then flew away. The cigarette stirred in the wind and rolled along the railing. The frame of the tall sliding glass door between the dining room and the terrace was harshly scratched andindented near its lock as if a pike or a crowbar had forced it open. Either it was thieves, he guessed, or like as not his son forgot his front door keys.
    Water was on in a shower upstairs. Atticus finished his coffee and went back inside and turned on the gas burner under the glass coffeepot. Whispers and dish noise had awakened him at sunup as the Mayans tidied the place when their wake was over. One of them had put the Jameson’s whiskey bottle on the red kitchen windowsill. Oranges were in a pink string bag by the refrigerator; copper pans were hanging