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At Customs they had her unpack the tent even though she warned them it was going to he more trouble than it was worth to fold it back into its cloth sack. But they insisted, four minor officials, three more than were needed, unfolded the flaps, checked the case, found the instructions Steven had written out for her tucked inside. By the time Tío Mundo came through the guarded doors with the man in charge, the officials had draped the canvas over the conveyor belt and were prepared to unfold it further, blocking the passageway.

“They didn’t believe me,” she said to her uncle about the four men still fumbling with the tent. “I told them it was just a tent.”

“A tent!” Tío Mundo pulled a long face. “What on earth does my pretty niece want with a tent?” He turned to his buddy in Customs, who was ordering the officials to put stickers on Yolanda’s things and detain her no longer. “These girls of Carlos come down and each time it’s something new!” The head official wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled vaguely. His lips still looked greasy, as if he’d been eating a fried snack in his office when Don Mundo had dropped in to ask if they couldn’t do him a little favor and speed his niece through the line.

In no time the inspectors had zippered shut Yolanda’s bags, but as she had predicted, they were unable to fold the cumbersome tent back snugly into its case. Two porters carried it between them, hammock style. There could have been a body hidden inside it.

Outside, the limousine had pulled up to the entrance. Through the tinted green glass, Yolanda could make out Lucinda and Carmencita and Tía Carmen. She rushed forward to say hello to her favorite cousins and aunt, but before she had reached the car, a young man shot out from behind the lifted trunk and hurried to open the door. He had such an eager look in his eye that Yolanda felt he must have met her before. He was a slim young man, no taller than she, though he looked to be a few years older, in his early twenties possibly. Her uncle came up between them and patted the young man on the back. “This is Francisco,” he introduced the new chauffeur, so there would be no mistaking him for one of the darker-skinned cousins. Francisco touched his forehead. “At your orders, señorita.”

The ride to the compound was catch-up. Who had married whom and what the forecast was on their happiness. New babies and whom they looked like, who had died and who was ill. Tía Carmen stopped in the middle of the news. “You seem—” she cupped her niece’s cheek in her hand, “happier this year.”

Her aunt was right. There was a man in Yolanda’s heart, but she was not about to confess and go through grueling interrogations. Besides, her Dominican aunt seemed to have psychic powers. Those dark, soulful, loving eyes could see through to their niece’s heart. They could see at the bottom of her overnight case the birth control packet Yolanda was finishing off.

“Maybe it’s just I’m a little heavier this year,” Yolanda said. Her aunt always equated weight with well-being. Quickly, she changed the subject to politics. “How are things?” A new president had been elected after years of unrest.

Her uncle had turned around in the front seat where he’d sat because the car was too crowded. He flipped his hand front and back. “Things are asi, asi,” he said, shrugging.

“To tell the truth, no one’s thinking much about politics these days.” Tía Carmen shook her head tragically. In her elegant, dark mourning dresses—there was always a fresh death to mourn in such a large family—her words had the ring of pronouncements. “Betsy hit us so hard. we‘re still catching our breath.”

“Just like a woman!” Tío Mundo winked at Francisco, and the two men shared a manly chuckle.

“Ay, Papi,” Lucinda groaned. But there was no affection in her voice.

Her uncle continued. “The new president, I’ll say this for him, he’s on the ball. The new highway will be ready next month. There’s construction now up in Bonao—”

“With your permission, señor,” Francisco interrupted. “A highway is not a house. Many are without a roof over their heads.” He pointed past Uncle’s face. Yolanda looked and saw empty fields on both sides of the road, bare of the usually feverishly lush vegetation. Here and there, four wobbly poles held up a thatched roof of palm branches. “The hurricane took the trees so there’s no palm wood to finish the walls of those huts.”

“People live there?” Yolanda shook her head. She had thought they were shade stands for the merchants on the side of the road. But even as she acknowledged Francisco, she was aware of the uncomfortable silence that had fallen inside the car. The chauffeur had spoken out of place. Someone was going to have to take the new man aside and instruct him on the do’s and don’ts of working for the clan.

“What about you, young lady?” Tío Mundo covered the hand she had put on the front seat to pull herself forward when Francisco had spoken. “The boys up there must be lining up! Let them look all they want. You come back and marry one of your own!” Tío nodded at his daughters. “Whats that saying of the Americans? No charge for looking at the merchandise?”

This was the kind of moment Yolanda would later recount to Steven, and he would shake his head. “It’s like going back to the nineteenth century,” she would roll her eyes to the ceiling. “Chaperones, virginity, girls can’t do this, girls can’t do that.” Sometimes, Yolanda had to admit to herself, she enjoyed the fuss. It made her feel like a romantic heroine, valued and important, instead of anonymous, one of several hundred co-eds crowded into a lecture hall, her foreign name mispronounced. Except for Steven—he made her feel plenty important. She had not told her parents about her long-haired, bearded young lover who had applied for c.o. status and was one of the campus agitators against the war. Her parents would have forbidden her to see him, no less camp out with him in the very tent she had brought down. In a way, she was getting back at them by bringing the contraband tent into the country!

Yolanda had tried talking her parents into letting her stay in her college town that summer working and sharing an apartment with “friends.” But the answer was no, n.o., spelled the same way, Spanish or English. Until she graduated from college and was on her own, she was to spend her summer with her Island family. She knew the ground plan—what her uncle had nodded about to her aunt—that she should meet and marry a young man from a prominent family, maybe one who had also been to school in the States. That way her education would he an asset, not a liability.

Having been forced to come against her will, Yolanda was determined to be here on her own terms. But this was nothing new. She always brought new ideas. Hippie ideas; one of the aunts had read about the phenomenon in a magazine her husband had brought her from the States. A few summers back it was vegetarianism. Everything in life, Yolanda explained, had a soul, and you built up karma like cholesterol you had to work off. Last summer, Yolanda wasn’t eating at all, fasting, she called it, to cleanse and stroke the organs. But she looked as skinny and pitiful as the country poor in a drought year. She read Zen poetry in translation to Yuri, the gardener, who said that if the señorita said so, the sound of one hand clapping made sense to him. It was no more riddling than the Virgin Mary giving birth to a human god baby. This summer, she was reading Steven’s trouble-making books. The class system was wrong. All the people should own the means of production. Her aunts and uncles were up in arms defending themselves.

Several times she went out back of the kitchen to a small courtyard enclosed by concrete blocks with a filigree design, where the servants gathered to relax during lulls in their work day, after meals or late at night. They welcomed her warmly, but always with so much protocol that she felt she was intruding. “Please señorita.” They all stood and offered her their chairs. “I can stand too,” she reminded them.

Her parents had emigrated when she was still so young that, unlike her cousins, Yolanda had never gotten used to the idea of servants. What were their work conditions like? How could they be improved? The servants spoke openly to her. Yuri didn’t earn enough to buy himself cigarettes. Iluminada. the cleaning maid, had a rotten tooth, but she couldn’t afford to have the dentist pull it. The cook, Zoraida, wanted to get her hair straightened but she didn’t have an extra cent to her name. Always, the complaint was followed by a request for a handout. Yolanda felt as if all they really wanted from her was money, not a true exchange of ideas. After a few times, she stopped dropping in for her visits. Her aunt, she could tell, was relieved.

Francisco, the chauffeur, was different from the others. He listened attentively when Yolanda talked about the States, about how students went on strike to protest a war that was going on in a little country not unlike this one, about how workers could do the same thing against bad working conditions. “But señorita, begging your pardon,” Francisco explained, “don’t you see, if we workers strike, we’ll just all be fired, and a whole new crew hired, willing to work for half what we earn?” Yolanda didn’t know what to propose. She wished Steven or one of his radical, well-informed friends were here to be specific.

One specific thing she did want to put a stop to. “Please don’t call me señorita, Francisco.” He had come to pick her up after one of her obligatory visits to a great-aunt, and she had wanted to take the front seat next to him. But he had insisted: “Unless the car is filled up, if you‘re seen in front, I could lose my job.” Obviously, somebody. probably the head chauffeur, had been taking the young man in hand and training him in the fine ways of being a chauffeur. He had lost his novice eagerness and was learning to deliver expert, silent service. “Okay. I’ll ride in back,” she had agreed, but she drew the line at señorita.

“But it’s no offense, señorita. It’s the custom here,. a title of respect—”

“I don’t need a title, Francisco. I’ve got a name.” She had come forward, folding her arms on top of the front seat, propping her chin upon them. “Yolanda,” Yolanda said, coaxing him. “Say it, go on, Francisco. Yo-lan-da.”

He looked at her in the rear view mirror, his gaze lingering a second too long. “You are very pretty, Yolanda.” he said. His voice had changed, become intimate and husky. Yolanda sat back in her seat. Her aunt had warned her that by befriending the servants, she confused them. They took advantage of her or misunderstood her friendliness as flirtation. But, unless someone took new steps, things were never going to change. If Francisco had gotten the wrong idea, the thing was, not to abandon the friendship, but to let him know delicately, so as not to hurt him, that she was not interested. She already had a boyfriend in the States.

The occasion came as a result of another of Yolanda’s schemes: six weeks had gone by, and she had yet to use the tent Steven had loaned her. She had been with him when he had bought the tent at the army surplus store in her college town. “A good recycling of military industrial crap,” he had said. But politics had not been the issue. They had used the tent that spring in order to sleep together and not put out one or another of their roommates in the dorms. They set up the tent out on the soccer field during the school week. Weekends, they headed for the Green Mountains. When their plans for the summer had fallen through, the tent had been a kind of consolation prize to her. Yolanda should scout out good campsites in her native land, Steven comforted her. Someday soon, they would go down together, and she’d know the best places to take him. Although Yolanda had never liked camping in and of itself, using the tent now would be a way of feeling close to Steven.

After the fiasco at Customs. the tent had been aired out on the wash line in the laundry yard, then folded neatly into its case by Francisco and Yuri and handed over to her uncle. Yolanda began talking up a camping trip among her cousins. Every meal the young people lobbied the old guard for permission. Negotiations whittled them down. The boy cousins lost interest when they realized they would basically be chaperoning a bunch of younger girl cousins. The girl cousins lost their nerve after their mothers took them aside and warned about tarantulas, mosquitoes, guerrillas. which they mispronounced gorillas, purposely, Yolanda believed, in order to get double the fear quotient out of the word. “Remember the countryside is still a mess after Betsy. People are desperate. Anything can happen,” her uncle warned ominously.

Finally, only Yolanda and Lucinda and Carmencita, and two little cousins who were eager to come along on an adventure with older girls were left lobbying to go. At last, Tío Mundo consented. He couldn’t stand to disappoint his girls, he said. They could go for an overnight to the family rancho just outside the capital.

“Ay, come on, Tío,” Yolanda pleaded with her uncle. “The rancho’d be like camping in the backyard.”

“Ya, ya, girls.” Uncle threw up his arms, and then like Pilate, he wrung his hands, washing them clean of the matter. “You’re on your own.” He spoke to the chauffeur in front of the young women, narrowing his eyes to make his point. “Francisco, take them wherever they want to go! They want to be conquistadors, let them go explore.” The tone in his voice was that of the villain in a fairy tale: they-will-be-sorry-they-asked!

Off they went, five girls in a merry mood from at last flying the coop. The older cousins lit up cigarettes the minute they were off compound limits, and the young girls worked the automatic windows up and down until Francisco put a stop to them. “You‘ll break them, señoritas.” Yolanda sat in front, her back against the door, so she was half turned to face Francisco and her cousins in the rear of the car. She told them all to be on the lookout, enumerating the qualities of a good camping site. Pointedly. she added, “Mi novio taught me how to scout for one.”

“Among other things!” Lucinda bit the fleshy part of her lower lip. Yolanda gave her the eye, but she was glad to see that although the younger cousins had begun looking eagerly out the windows for a level spot with shade trees and running water, Francisco had caught her older cousin’s hidden intent. Now he understood—if he had had any doubts before—that Yolanda had not been flirting with him. And since novio could mean either a boyfriend or a fiance, for all Francisco knew, Yolanda was on the brink of marriage.

Once out of the city limits, the countryside began to change. Unlike the cleaned-up strip along the airport highway, the landscape here seemed mined: acres and acres of burnt fields. The cousins did not know what had happened. Francisco had grown quieter and did not volunteer an explanation until asked. This had once been a beautiful forest until the gringos had burned it down.

“Why on earth?” Yolanda asked. But the explanation had already been spotted.

“Look,” one of the little cousins called out. Up ahead, a sign on a tipped-over pole had been defaced with a black cross. “United States Marine Camp.” Yolanda’s little cousin stumbled over the English words. The marines had spent a good part of last year here in this occupation camp while civil war raged in the capital. Francisco spoke up: “We’ve had two bad hurricanes, Betsy. and the Yanquis.”

“Let’s go see it, Francisco.” Yolanda sat up and looked eagerly out her window, half-expecting to see a troop of blonde G.I.’s like the R.O.T.C. guys on campus Steven and his friends were always demonstrating against. The camp had been deserted for the good part of a year, Francisco explained. But he was at her service.

Off he swerved, down a bumpy road that came to a dead end at a cleared field. The girls climbed out of the car and looked around. Up and down the length of the field were poured cement floors, embedded with iron rings. Patches and tufts of grass were breaking through the cracks in the cement: the land was taking back its own. Rainy season was working its magic. At the bottom of the hilly plain, the flooded river was spanned by a chain link bridge that swayed and jingled in the breeze. Beyond were blessedly green rolling hills. Yolanda began crossing over and waved to her cousins to follow her.

“That thing looks dangerous,” Lucinda called through the megaphone she had made with her hands. “Come back here!”

But Yolanda kept going, stopping midway to contemplate the rolling, rushing water through the links below her feet. Dark green seagrasses tossed wildly in the current. They reminded Yolanda of helicopters landing in the Vietnam jungles on the news every night in the States, tossing the nearby trees and grasses with the wind of their descent.

Francisco joined her on the bridge. He looked at her a moment before he spoke. “I did not know you had a novio.”

“I don’t let it be known, Francisco, or my family—you know how they are.”

“So your novio, he is a—” Francisco hesitated, searching for the polite term, Yolanda was sure. “He is an American man?”

Yolanda looked down and saw her hands were gripping the chain link fence, so her knuckles shone white. “You do not like the Americans?”

Francisco shook his head. The bridge beneath their feet swayed. Yolanda held on tighter to the guard rail to keep her balance.

“You know, Francisco,” Yolanda offered, “not all Americans are alike. Steven, mi novio, for example, doesn’t agree with the American policies here or in Vietnam.”

But Francisco did not want to talk politics. “This novio, if he is serious, why doesn’t he declare himself to your family?”

“Things are different in the States.”

“And you go along with their custom?”

“Yes, I guess when it comes to this, yes.”

He turned to face her, and she felt that now he had something more personal he wanted to say. Afraid, she turned away. On the surface of the water, little rings began to form, linking with each other like a chain, then widening and disappearing. New links formed as more drops fell.

“It’s raining!” Wild shouts came from the shore. There was a stampede of cousins toward the car. Yolanda and Francisco hurried after them. Once inside the car, they dried themselves off with towels from their knapsacks; the cousins debated whether to turn back.

“No way I’m going back now,” Yolanda announced. “It’s nothing but a little shower.” Big drops fell on the car top, with the sound of insects smashing on the windshield as the ear sped down the pebbly road.

They turned into the main highway, then veered off again over rough terrain. Francisco wound around and around hillsides until Yolanda felt they were traveling deeper into the heart of the country than the agreement with her uncle had allowed. Soon they were thrashing through a dark, dense jungle of vegetation. Beyond the tinted windshield, vines fell in thick coils from the branches of arching trees. Yolanda gaped at the sheer drop of a ravine to the river below: the land looked as if someone had hacked it open and exposed its dark, wet, beating life.

By the time they came through the tunnel, the sun was shining brightly. The sky glowed a picture-postcard turquoise. Ahead was a grassy, gently rolling plain, watered by a small brook and shaded by a grove of thriving mimosa trees. It was a little garden spot the hurricane had bypassed, cradled between the hills, a place Steven would have chosen to camp! “This is perfect, Francisco.” Yolanda congratulated him.

The girls climbed out of the car and raced eagerly up a small hill. To the south was the deep blue ocean—or sky? Only when a carrier or cargo ship or tourist boat appeared on the horizon was there a reminder of a seam between heaven and earth. To the east was the capital. Modern office buildings were going up, and in the more exclusive residential neighborhoods, old world stucco and salmon-colored houses sprawled over kempt green lawns. Then, to the north-west, lay the disgrace of the shanty village where most of the damage from the hurricane had been concentrated. Finally, the barracks that strategically surrounded the wedding cake of a presidential palace where most coups and revolutions got started.

Carmencita pointed to a complex of houses surrounded by lawns. “Look! Our house! We sure seem close.”

Francisco did not respond. He turned back down toward the car, his hands jingling the loose change in his pockets, a sound that reminded Yolanda of the jingling of the chain link bridge in the breeze. The girls followed him, trying to break their hillside run. They hoisted their gear out of the trunk, Francisco lifting the tent to his chest as if he were carrying a small child. “Shall I set it up for you, señoritas?”

Yolanda reached for the tent very much as if it were her child. “I‘ve been setting it up all spring,” she lied. In fact, she had mostly helped Steven by handing him stakes or holding one of the complication of flaps as he sorted them out. “No problem, Francisco.”

She turned away and began taking the tent out of its case, not daring to look over her shoulder, so the young man would not be encouraged to stand by. The car engine started, and the black limousine moved slowly down the narrow dirt road, disappearing into the green tunnel.

Yolanda and her cousins set to work on the tent. As she unpacked it, Yolanda looked for Steven’s instructions, handwritten on yellow, legal-sized paper, the letters tilting in the wrong direction as if some wind of passion were blowing through what he had to say. The instructions were supposed to he in the center of the coiled tent. Vaguely, she recalled the officials at Customs finding them, handing them to her. What had she done with them? She patted the pockets of her jeans as if just now the transaction had occurred. She remembered specifically slipping them back in between the canvas flaps. Again, the cousins spread the canvas out, rummaging in its folds, until it lay a confused heap at their feet. But there was no sign of the yellow sheet of paper.

“I thought you said you knew how to set this thing up?” Lucinda‘s hand was on her hip.

“Not without the instructions,” Yolanda said. This was not one of the newer, spiffy sporting goods tents, but an old, complicated contraption already outdated even in the army. Yolanda was disappointed, of course, since the whole point of the camping trip had been to use the tent. But something had been gained: for the first time the girl cousins had been allowed out for an overnight on their own. They must make this first freedom into a great success. “Look, you guys. It’s no big deal. Most people wouldn’t even be using a tent in this weather.” The group looked up worriedly at the sky.

They spent most of the afternoon arguing with each other. The mosquitoes or horse flies, or whatever they were, came up from the brook. Whoever said she was going to bring it had forgotten the bug spray. Carmencita would die if the insect she was allergic to hit her. Lucinda had cut her finger on the tin of sardines. She would have lockjaw by morning. The cousins were in foul moods and blamed their imminent deaths on each other. They turned in early to avoid the bugs. bypassing dinner, after snacking all afternoon on the dainty party sandwiches Zoraida had packed in the cooler.

Late that night, Yolanda stirred in the darkness. She listened to the breathing of her sleeping companions. A distant cock crowed. Then the sound of thunder, faint rumbles, getting closer and closer. But the sound which made her body jolt, fully awake, was that of a man’s cough. She was sure of it. A gruff voice amplified by a failed attempt to muffle the sound in the fist. Ever so slowly, Yolanda rolled over toward the others, hoping to nudge them awake.

Suddenly, the sky lit up. There was a thunderous explosion. The cousins woke with a start; they had been through so many in the last seven years, they were sure this was yet another revolution. But a second flash of lightning revealed the rolling bills, the palm trees doubling over in the high winds. A heavy curtain of rain began to fall. The girls lifted the tent they had placed as a dry pallet on the ground over their heads and huddled close to the trunk of the largest of the mimosas. It was good to have been spared a resolution, but once soaked, a rainstorm was bad enough. The youngest of the cousins began to cry. “I’m going to get pneumonia.”

In the next flash of lightning, they saw a dark shape hurrying uphill towards them in the driving rain. One of the little cousins screamed, and the others followed. Yolanda was sure the band of desperate campesinos had come for them. They could hold the girls hostage. Her cousins, at any rate, would bring in a handsome ransom. Their father was a big industrialist, who had been part of the junta the Americans had put in place to conduct the country’s business before the elections could be held.

“It’s just me, señoritas.” The familiar voice was muffled by the splattering of rain and rumbling of thunder.

“Oh Francisco. Francisco!” The young women reached out their arms, urging him to come quickly under the cover of the tree. They lifted the canvas over his head and waited for the rainstorm to end. One of the cousins told the story of the lost instructions. “I think they must have dropped out in Customs,” Yolanda explained. “They were on a yellow piece of paper.”

“Oh . . . that paper,” Francisco remembered it well. “Yuri and I found it when we were packing up the tent; we gave it to your uncle so it wouldn’t get lost.”

So that’s where the instructions had gone! Briefly it crossed Yolanda’s mind that her uncle had kept the paper in order to sabotage their outing and teach the girls a lesson. Now, more than ever, she was determined to prove him wrong. There was no way, even if a hurricane was on its way that she’d head back home this very night.

A plot began to hatch: as soon as the rain cased, they would make a dash for the car. It was parked not too far from this very spot, Francisco explained. “All we have to do is hike down the back of this hill and we’ll be at the little bridge. Remember?” He lowered his voice as if he were referring to a private rendezvous Yolanda and he had enjoyed there.

“We must be farther than that, Francisco?” Yolanda had grown suspicious. “Why, we drove away from there for over an hour.” And then, just as the lightning shone for a moment on the outline of the landscape around her, Yolanda saw the bits of evidence coalescing: her uncle’s look, the stolen instructions, the compound so close by when they looked towards the capital at the summit of the hill. They had been tricked! They had been led to believe that they were truly in the interior, winding around and around over rough road, and here they were just a hop, skip, and a jump from the new highway! She was surprised, not at her uncle, but at Francisco. Despite his progressive ideas about politics, the old customs about women still held. He had fallen in with her uncle.

As soon as the rain let up. the group gathered up their gear. Francisco led them, down the hill, through a thin grove of trees, and there they were at the river bank. The sky had begun to clear; here and there a star sifted through: the moon, almost full, radiated through the thinner and thinner layers of cloud so that the sky shone with a strange iridescence. At the bridge, the cousins hesitated, but Francisco urged them across. They held the tent and sleeping gear in a single file flank to their left while with their free hands, they grasped the guard rail nervously.

Parked on a cement slab was the car. The girls argued about whether or not they should return to the compound this very night. “Look, I get to leave at the end of the summer,” Yolanda persuaded, “but you guys will never hear the end of it. Besides, if we try setting out tonight on these back roads, we’ll probably get stuck in the mud. Right, Francisco?”

“At your orders. señorita.”

They draped the damp bedding over the top of the car to drain, so that the sheets and light flannels fell over the windshield and windows. Inadvertently, the girls had found a way to curtain off the early and bright tropical dawn. They would get some sleep this awful night. But what about Francisco? He would not come into the car with them. “He won’t sleep with us,” Lucinda explained. “It just wouldn’t look right.”

“Look right to whom?” Yolanda snapped. She was fed up with all of them. In spite of her resolve never ever to order the servants around, she commanded the chauffeur from her front seat, “Francisco, you come in here right now!” But the chauffeur merely chuckled and begged off. “Should you need me, señorita, I’ll be right outside. At your service.”

For a while, between sleep and waking, Yolanda heard the humming of the air conditioning and the breathing of the others in the sealed interior of the car. Later, she heard the door click open, the windows whirled down a crack from the control panel on the driver’s armrest. The engine was turned off. Through her opened window, she would hear the chiming of the chain links on the bridge. Several times that night, Yolanda woke up, disoriented, but the sound of the chains would recall her to where she was.

In the morning, she woke to cock crow, and it was as if they were in the tent, all the windows covered up by their sleeping gear. Quietly, so as not to wake the others, Yolanda opened her door and let herself out. Just ahead sat Francisco, fast asleep, his back against the trunk of a palm tree, the green canvas of Steven’s tent draped over his shoulders like a poncho.

Yolanda stood so close that she noticed the way his hair waved back from his forehead in tight curls, his shoulders rose and fell. Just so Steven slept, his mouth slightly open, his body limp and sweet beside her. She felt a surprising tenderness. Why hadn’t it struck her before, so viscerally? Because he was the chauffeur? Because her family would consider such attraction taboo? Some things did come of being part gringa, she thought. She had sprung free of the old customs. Well, almost.

Francisco stirred awake, sensing a presence. Slowly, he rose to his feet.

“So, you took us to the interior, eh, Francisco?” There was irony in her voice he might have mistaken for play had she not looked directly into his eyes. This time, his were the first to look away.

“Your uncle’s orders,” the young man admitted, as if she should take it up with her own family. “I wasn’t to lose sight of the señoritas for a moment. And it’s a good thing too, or you would have gotten drenched.” He indicated the tent draped in folds at his feet. There was still water caught in those folds.

“But we wouldn’t have gotten drenched if we’d been able to set it up,” Yolanda reminded Francisco. “You said that my uncle kept the yellow sheet of paper with the instructions?”

The young man nodded slowly as if for the first time he too comprehended, link by link, the whole chain of events that led to their shared helplessness this moment.

Both gazed a moment at the dark green canvas as if neither knew quite what to do with it. Then, bending, Yolanda took up one of the flaps. Francisco bent to help her, picking up two and handing her another of the flaps. They backed off from each other until there was a large, taut canvas plane between them. They tilted it to make the water run off, and then, as if it were a dance whose steps they knew by heart, she stepped toward him, he stepped toward her, corner to corner, they doubled forward and back until the tent was folded up so snugly it slid easily back into its cloth sack.