his legs in a self-satisfied way, and took a swig from his Coke.
“We’ll see about that,” I said with a laugh. I picked up a ball and, coming up to the foul line in stride, released it and hit eight pins.
“We should get us some of ’em bowling shirts,” Fierro said with a glance at the family in the lane nearby. “We could be The Deadly Pins. Wait, no. The Mortal Pins! How’s that?”
I picked up another ball and went back to the line. I knew before I threw it that I’d hit the last two pins and score a spare. The thing about Fierro was, he was a good player, but he was easily distracted. He missed two easy shots because he kept chattering. I beat him handily.
After the game, I drove him back to Desert Hot Springs. The moon had already risen and the streets were empty and quiet, but there was some kind of outdoor celebration in his apartment complex, with loud music playing and kids splashing in the pool. He eyed the partiers wearily, then got out of the car and reached through the open window to shake my hand. “See you next week, brother.”
I got back on the highway, taking my time going home. Under my headlights, the yellow lines that marked the edge of the lane passed ceaselessly. I’d turned in my final paper for the spring semester, and I had hours and hours to kill before I could hope to fall asleep. Dolly Parton’s “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” came on the radio and, whether because of the mood it set or because of my bout of nostalgia, I found myself thinking again about that dinner with Nora, going over every detail as if to sear it in my mind.
Efraín
After the old man robbed me of the pleasure of watching my daughter’s performance in the school play, he invaded my dreams. Nearly every night, I returned to that little stretch of the 62, my hands covered with grease, and watched his body roll off the hood of the car and land on the pavement. I thought of him now as Guerrero. Merciless in his campaign against me. Early in the morning, when I shaved by the yellow light above the bathroom mirror, he bumped against me and made me cut myself. In the van, while Enrique read the map, Guerrero was in the back, sabotaging our equipment by poking a hole in the carpet-cleaning hose or raiding our food supplies. I couldn’t find my Inca Kola when I opened my lunchbox, even though I had put it there myself. “You can have some of mine,” Enrique said, handing me his can. A button was missing on his uniform shirt and I wondered if that, too, was Guerrero’s doing.
Part of me, the part that had coolly measured the cost of calling the police and decided it was too high, knew that this was all in my head. It wasn’t the first time I had nicked myself while shaving, the carpet-cleaning hose was very old, Marisela had replaced my soda with water when my back was turned. But another part of me scrupulously tracked all the mishaps and setbacks I had suffered since the night of the accident and held up the tally to me at every opportunity. The longer I refused to come forward, the longer the list grew.
It surprised me that my memory of the accident did not dull with time, but became clearer instead. Now I was certain, or nearly certain, that the car that struck Guerrero was silver and that, whatever make or model it was, it had a long hood. And there was a sticker on the rear side window, round and red, an advertisement of some kind. Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember. Several times a day, I returned to that moment on the highway, seeing it differently each time, as if it had been cast under a new light.
I didn’t tell my wife about the new details that had come to me, and she didn’t mention the accident on Saturday night when, exhausted from work