with no warning in a place where I was not wanted. I had been stupid to think that I could do this. I felt sick.
On one side of the road, spiky plants grew in unbroken rows. On the other side, the trees and scrub towered over the cab. The cabby did not slow for potholes; the cab jolted and bumped over rocks and raised a cloud of dust. We passed a cluster of battered stucco houses. The driver slowed to let chickens scatter before us, then drove through an archway and down a dirt road to a cluster of palm-thatched huts that looked even more dilapidated than the stucco houses.
The dust settled slowly. The place seemed deserted. Washing—three T-shirts and a pair of jeans—hung on a line by one hut. The tarp that shaded a group of folding tables flapped lazily in a light breeze.
The cabdriver opened the door and said something in Spanish. I hesitated, then climbed out to stand beside the cab. "Where are the ruins?" I asked. "Las ruinas?" He frowned and waved a hand at the huts.
I saw a white-haired man duck through the curtained doorway of one of the huts, squint at the cab, and start walking toward us. The sun burned on my face. I tried to smile at the white-haired old man, but I was glad my sunglasses hid my eyes. "You may want the cab to wait," the man said. He stood, his hands in his pockets, in the scant shade of a tree. "Not much to see here and it's a long walk back to the bus stop on the highway."
"Isn't there an excavation here?" My voice was just a little unsteady.
The old man did not take his hands from his pockets. "That's true," he said. "But there's still not much to see."
"I'm looking for Elizabeth Butler," I said. "I'm her daughter, Diane Butler. Is she here?"
He took one hand from his pocket to push his straw hat farther back on his head. His eyes were blue and curious. "I see," he said. "Well." A pause. "Then perhaps you'd better let the taxi go." Another pause. "Liz didn't tell me that you were coming."
"She didn't know."
"Ah." He nodded.
"Is she here?"
"She's swimming. I'll send someone down to get her." He turned and looked toward the huts. A man was strolling across the plaza toward us. "Hey, John," the old man called. "Could you go get Liz? She has a visitor."
Behind me, the cabby was pulling my suitcase from the trunk. He set it in the dust beside me and said something in Spanish. I fumbled for money, grateful to be able to look away from the old man's eyes for a moment. The cab wheeled around in another cloud of dust and left me there.
The man took my arm in one hand and my suitcase in the other. "You must be hot and thirsty. I'll fix you a drink while we wait for your mother."
"I guess she'll be surprised to see me," I said. I tried to ignore the tears that had started to spill over. I wasn't even sure why I had started crying.
He wrapped a warm, dusty arm around my shoulders. "Take it easy now. It'll be okay."
I could not stop. The tears seemed to come of their own volition, through no fault of mine, and his voice seemed very far away. The bandanna he gave me smelled of dust.
"I'll make you something to drink and you can tell me about all this." He turned me around gently and started me walking.
"Sorry ..." The word caught in my throat and I couldn't say more.
"Nothing to be sorry about," he said, and he kept his arm around my shoulders. He led me across a central plaza and into one of the huts. The curtain that blocked the doorway fell closed behind us.
His hut was a single whitewashed room, furnished with two lawn chairs, a cooler, a footlocker, a small folding table that served as a desk, and a hammock that was looped over the hut's center beam and pushed to one side of the room. Half the hut was filled with cardboard boxes, picks, jacks, and shovels.
He made me sit in one of the lawn chairs, rummaged in a footlocker for plastic cups, and then in the cooler for a bottle of gin. "I'm Anthony Baker," he told me. "Call me Tony. If you're Liz's daughter, you'll drink gin and tonic."