Chapter 4

We go back two days later, and Trevor insists it’s strategic.

“I met with Pruitt yesterday,” he says in the car, one hand on the wheel and the other conducting an invisible orchestra. “He’s a good guy. Very patient. But I want to compare what he told me with what Camila told us. A second opinion. Triangulation.”

“You want more of the anticuchos.”

“I want both, ” Trevor says, with dignity.

Lena has stayed behind to tour a condominium with an agent who promised “sweeping views” and “motivated sellers.” She asked me to take notes on anything Trevor says that sounds reckless. I’ve been taking them mentally since the parking garage.

The side street looks different in the late morning. The laundromat is busy, and a kid on a scooter is circling the phone-case shop with the unhurried menace of a shark. The green awning of Camila’s is rolled halfway out, and a handwritten chalkboard on the sidewalk announces the lunch special: Ají de gallina, arroz, ensalada — $14. The cinder block holds the door open. The smell reaches us before we reach it, onions and garlic and something warm and yellow, and Trevor makes a small, involuntary sound like a man spotting an old friend.

“Triangulation,” I say.

“Shut up.”

Camila isn’t at the counter when we walk in. For a second the room seems different without her in it, and I’m surprised by how quickly I notice. A cook’s voice sings from the kitchen, the same unembarrassed tenor from the first visit, working through a ballad one wrong note at a time. The two men in work boots are back at their table in the corner, and the woman with the laptop is gone.

At the table nearest the register, though, Sienna sits cross-legged on a chair with a shoebox of receipts in her lap.

She doesn’t look up. She’s sorting, flipping each slip of paper face-up, squaring the edges against her knee, and dropping it into one of four piles on the table, with the quick, absent rhythm of someone dealing cards. There’s a pencil behind her ear and another in her ponytail, and a calculator beside her elbow that she hasn’t touched. Next to the piles lies a clipboard with a printed delivery schedule, annotated in three colors of ink.

“Be right with you,” she says. “Sit anywhere. Not that table, the leg’s loose.”

“We’re not...” Trevor starts.

“The leg’s still loose,” she says, and sets another receipt on a pile.

We sit at the table by the window, the same one as last time. I watch her work. There’s a practiced efficiency to it, the kind I’ve seen in rookies who grew up in dugouts and veteran clubhouse managers who’ve been doing the same job for thirty years. It isn’t the briskness of someone playing at being useful. It’s the briskness of someone who has been handed responsibility without ever being handed the authority that normally comes with it, and has decided to do the job anyway.

She finishes the last pile, clips the receipts into stacks with binder clips from her pocket, writes a number on a sticky note, and finally looks up.

“Okay,” she says. “Hi. You came back.”

“We came back,” Trevor says.

“That’s usually a good sign.” She sticks the note to the box and slides it onto a shelf beneath the register. “Camila’s at the produce place. She’ll be back in twenty minutes. Rafael’s in the kitchen, so don’t try to talk to him, he’s doing the ají de gallina and he gets weird.”

“Weird how?” I ask.

“Weirder than usual.”

From the kitchen, the singing cuts off mid-phrase, and a man’s voice calls, “I can hear you, Sienna!”

“Good!” she calls back.

The singing resumes, louder and slightly more defiant. Trevor looks at me with his eyebrows up. I shrug. In the space of one afternoon and one short exchange, we have gone from being customers to being furniture in somebody else’s household.

Sienna brings us menus we don’t need and a plate of cancha we do. She sets the corn down between us and then, with no apparent hesitation, takes the empty chair at the end of our table, pulls the clipboard onto her knee, and says, “What can I do for you?”

“We’re not here to...” Trevor starts again.

“You’re here to ask me something. People who come back always are.” She says it kindly, matter-of-factly, like a weather report. “Camila’s busy, and I’m what’s available.”

I glance at Trevor. He looks briefly caught, and then recovers, because he is nothing if not adaptable. He leans forward and lowers his voice with the exaggerated confidentiality of a man about to ask a favor.