“My mother said she’d send somebody.”

“The young lady left at five,” she said.

“She asked the desk for a taxi to the bus.”

“Did she say where?”

“She didn’t say anything.

She didn’t look at him after the doctor cleared him.”

And I said, “Nothing at all?”

And Perlita, who had been doing that job for a long time and who I think had decided something about me in the first ten seconds, said: