“What things?” Mary looked robust and pink-cheeked, as usual. She had come from playing tennis.

“Suffering, poverty, injustice.” Joan paused. “And natural disasters. Did you know, for example, that they had another big earthquake in Guatemala? Whole towns wiped out?”

The last time she’d gone to the import store there had been a new clerk, a tiny woman in a brilliantly embroidered blouse and a long wrap skirt tied at the waist with a woven belt.

“No, I didn’t.”

“The lady at the import store told me when I bought my bag.”

“That big drawstring with the gorgeous parrot on it?”

“It’s a quetzal, not a parrot,” Joan said.

The last time she’d gone to the import store there had been a new clerk, a tiny woman in a brilliantly embroidered blouse and a long wrap skirt tied at the waist with a woven belt. “This,” the woman had said, running her fingers lightly over the needlework on the bag Joan was considering, “is the quetzal. It is a bird sacred to the Maya people of Guatemala.”

“Like the ones on your blouse?” Joan had said.

The woman tossed her waist-length braid over her shoulder and looked down at two birds perched amid blue and yellow and bright pink flowers on the front of her blouse. “Ah, no,” she said. “On my huipil are hummingbirds. They show the triumph of love over pain and jealousy.”

In the deli, Joan leaned toward her friend. She lowered her voice. “Mary,” she said, “when I carry that bag, I can feel — everything. The terror. The confusion. I hear people weeping. I see houses falling in, and churches. Children crushed. If I stand very still, holding that bag, I can feel the ground shaking under my feet.” Joan stopped; she hadn’t meant to say so much.

Mary chewed her tenderloin thoughtfully. “Maybe you should see a shrink,” she said.

Joan sat back, frowning. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Charlie and the kids would think I was crazy.”

They were already concerned. After the second incident at the supermarket, Charlie had devised a plan whereby the girls escorted Joan on shopping trips, Lita steering her clear of the dangerous aisles, while Kate darted back and forth to fill the cart. Keeping up with Lita’s steady stream of conversation, Joan was not supposed to notice the growing heap of objectionable goods hidden beneath an innocent layer of bread and cereal boxes.