now Ronnie was gone. The villagers knew one another’s lives down to the aching bunion. A disaster like this would travel on the wind.
“Yes,” Lorna said.
“I know someone who may be able to help.”
Erlinda was clutching a small, grimy, spiral-bound notebook. She opened it on the dining table. Inside were handwritten names with addresses and telephone numbers.
She had no reading glasses. She leaned so close that her nose nearly touched the paper.
She ran a finger up and down the pages.
“Here!” Erlinda said. “Give me your phone.”
Lorna held out the cell phone.
“How much load do you have on here?” Erlinda asked. She meant the balance left on the phone’s pre-paid SIM card.
“About two-fifty,” Lorna said.
“We’ll have to make it quick so you don’t run out.”
“Run out? Two hundred and fifty pesos?”
“You’ll need it all,” Erlinda said. “We are calling the United States.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Favor said. “I’m fine. I’m glad to see you—it’s been too long—but if that’s why you’re here, you wasted a trip.”
He was sitting with Mendonza and Stickney and Arielle in a gazebo that sat on a wide lawn between the lodge and the shoreline of the lake. It was late afternoon, the day after his encounter at the Lover’s Leap campground, and a strip of white bandage showed around the open collar of his shirt.
Favor wasn’t talking about his wound, though. He meant his state of mind.
“Ari is concerned,” Stickney said. Stickney’s voice was quiet and low, with a hint of honey-smooth Caribbean vowels. It was a voice that could have belonged to a midnight deejay on an FM jazz station. Cooler than cool.
“If Ari is worried, we’re worried,” Mendonza said.
Favor said, “Ari is an alarmist.”
“Ray,” she said. “Mooning around like a sick hound. Crapping out in a meeting. Blowing off a million-dollar deal. Multimillion. Please.”
They were watching him, waiting for his response. Mendonza and Stickney sat on either side of Arielle, around an octagonal table in the center of the gazebo. Favor realized that although they spoke on the phone several times a year, he hadn’t seen either Mendonza or Stickney in almost four years.
The two men had always been physical opposites: Mendonza blocky and muscular, Stickney slim and spare. Favor, looking at them now, thought at first that the years hadn’t changed them much. But he realized this wasn’t exactly true. They had become even more intense versions of themselves: Mendonza, an avid weight lifter, was now truly bull-like, with a thick, corded neck and a powerful upper body; Stickney was now completely lean and angular, without an ounce of excess flesh on his bones. His face was drawn, almost ascetic.
Favor said, “I’ve been in a little funk, that’s all,” he said. “It happens.”
Mendonza gave a derisive snort. “Never saw it happen to you, stud.”
Stickney said, “A funk, Ray? Can you be more specific?”
Favor didn’t like explaining himself, but he was enjoying the moment, the four of them together again. He couldn’t imagine talking this way with anybody else.
“It’s like this,” he said. “When I started investing, I got some advice from an old fart. He told me that banking the first hundred million is always fun. After that, making money starts to feel like real work. He said that’s when you find out if you want to be just rich or filthy stinking rich.”
Mendonza said: “And he was…”
“Oh, he was filthy stinking rich for sure,” Favor said. “I laughed at him. At the time, I couldn’t believe that making lots and lots of money would ever be anything but lots and lots of fun.”
“You’re telling me you hit a hundred mil?” Mendonza said. “Nine figures?”
“Probably about two years ago. I never knew it at the time, though.”
“Jesus, Ray. I knew you were doing okay. But a hundred million?”
“It’s up around one-sixty now,” Favor said.
“Jeeee-zus!”
“And he was right,” Favor continued. “It hasn’t been fun for a while now. I just never slowed down long enough to realize it.”
Stickney was nodding. “I understand that,” he said. “You’re at a point, you start to sort things out. You wonder how you want to spend the rest of your life.”
“Exactly.”
“You could give it all away and start over,” Mendonza said.
“I’ve considered that. I might do it. But the point isn’t how much money I have. It’s how much time is left, and what I’m going to do with it.”
Nobody spoke for a couple of minutes. The day was bright but chilly. A steady breeze rippled the water along the shoreline and raised a chop out on the