“So what now?” she said.

“Why didn’t you get this key a year ago?” Luis asked her, in his beautiful accent. His voice was neither low nor high, a rich melodious sound like the mid-range of a cello. When he whispered, it really was like a very light bowing over strings. It was delicious to Annika how he didn’t say words like “wood” properly, and she did not think that making fun of him for it was any different (though Lizette had once gently tried to explain it to her) than how he teased her about how she couldn’t roll her “r’s.” Annika only mused over another thing Lizette had told her, as it added to the warm and colorful dream she liked to make up about Luis’s childhood: how mothers in Mexico, almost the moment their babies were born, got in their faces and “rrrrr”-ed all day and night, to teach them to be proper Spanish-speaking children. Lying on her bed at home, Annika savored the thought of her Luis in connection to every Spanish name of a street or river or town that she could think of: Brazos, San Marcos, Lampasas, Laredo, Zapata, Lamesa, Uvalde.

His voice was neither low nor high, a rich melodious sound like the mid-range of a cello. When he whispered, it really was like a very light bowing over strings.

“What business is it of yours?” the woman said testily to Luis.

Luis shrugged. “None of my business, unless you want this key,” he said, with an impassive expression. Annika ducked her head to keep the woman from seeing her smile. Then there was desperation in the woman’s face, she knew she was being ganged up on now. Annika turned to look out the window, and then she saw that around the university power plant across the street, men were putting up barricades. They worked quickly, with cables and long wooden barriers, guards taking up posts all around the perimeter. One of them shouted something to another that Annika couldn’t hear.

“Look at that,” she said, and even her own voice sounded odd to her. “Something’s going on out there.”

Luis glanced out, then looked back at the woman. The woman did not look at all. Annika released the slip quickly when Luis reached for it, watching the white paper pass into his squarish brown fingers. A light dusting of black hair curled over his arm and wrist. “We’ll have to show this to our boss,” he said.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded of Luis. She had placed both of her palms on the counter in exasperation, and now she threw them up and jutted her chin forward like a turtle.

“I don’t know. Who are you?” Luis muttered as he turned away. The woman let out a grunt of anger. Annika smiled weakly at her before following Luis into Bobbie’s office, where Bobbie was staring at her computer screen. There was a still picture on it of the sky, a tall building, and a kind of cloud. Annika couldn’t see it clearly, so she turned her gaze to the sculpted back of Bobbie’s dyed, peanut-colored hair. The office was filled with photographs of her daughter who played the flute, and Bobbie’s little big-eyed dogs. Also, on the wall behind the computer hung a studio photograph from the seventies of Bobbie, her hair dark brown, and her husband and her daughter when the girl was only a baby, all of them dressed in Superman suits, even the baby in a blue onesie and cape. It was hard not to snicker at that.

The room was dim and Bobbie didn’t look up from what she was reading even when Luis cleared his throat.

“Excuse us, could we get your help with someone?” he said.

Bobbie finally turned and looked at them, her tan face blank and strange.

Annika stared back at her. “Bobbie,” she said slowly, “do you know what’s going on with the power plant?”

“No, I don’t,” Bobbie said. “Why?” She turned to look out her window, but the shades were down, so instead she looked back at her computer. “But look at this, something’s happened at those big towers.”

Annika crinkled her eyes. “Our tower?”

“No, no …” Bobbie kept reading.

“Oh, good,” Annika said and patted her chest. She went to peek, anyway, through the blinds, to see if she could detect any problems with the UT tower from here. People were still setting up barriers and unrolling orange tape and walking briskly down the street, but Annika couldn’t see the tower from this angle. They had just opened it up again a year or two ago — about thirty years after a Marine had shot all those people from it.