When Annika left for the day to walk home, she kicked indignantly at the hordes of ungracious grackles that covered the university grounds, and were not afraid of anybody. In her head she had a dozen new pictures of Luis stored up from the day: Luis leaning over his keyboard, squinting at an online article, swearing softly, later discussing the news with Lizette, and rolling his dark, zealous eyes; Luis with his uncondescending kindness helping Bobbie in her struggle — as she raised her low-pitched, bullying voice louder and louder — to explain a policy to a Mexican cafeteria worker, easing the young man’s frozen, angry smile; Luis half-heartedly working on a paper for his marketing class. He was working slowly on a bachelor’s degree in business, taking a class every other semester or so.

When Luis touched Annika enough, in any one spot, so that the skin there began to get warm, she shuddered. How ridiculous for such a small area to be so happy! The last person she had slept with was Teddy (aside from her old boyfriend Carl, briefly, when she had first come to Texas — but her re-encounter with that poor man had hardly even registered), and she had forgotten the deep satisfaction of making love to a straight man, who loved your body not only because it was yours, but also because it was the thing he wanted in the abstract.

Luis covered her with warm spots, and she ran over them with her own fingers. Over him, in the van, Annika stroked his thickly-haired chest in time with her rocking, and later he would make her laugh with pride when he said that from the concentration on her serious white-pink face he could tell that she was melting anything destructive that had ever run through his blood, and lifting it out of the vessels.

One day early in September, she walked past a playground on her way home. A group of eleven or twelve-year-olds was out. The boys threw a football to each other over a long distance, and about thirty yards away, nine or ten girls stood in a patient line, one by one throwing a football to a lead girl. Two of the girls wore black headscarves and long dresses.

Then Annika noticed a lone girl in a jeans jacket stalking around the edges of the field. She held her arms tightly across her chubby body. Beneath the brim of a cap her face held a fierce look made of keen interest in the game combined with a painful need to conceal that feeling. None of the other children looked at her.

Her mind turned in the heat; she thought of Luis, and shuddered as if she were cold.

Annika stopped walking. She felt a violent throbbing pity for the girl. The sun was already crisping her pasty freckled shoulders but she stopped to stare hard at the lonely child, then at the rest of the children. “Someone go get her,” she muttered on the walk. “Someone go get her!” Her mind turned in the heat; she thought of Luis, and shuddered as if she were cold. “Someone touch her!” she said right out loud. “Someone get over there and put their arms around that girl!” She put her hot hands over her face and felt disoriented and sick. How could anyone, even children, ignore such craving loneliness? Why did it have to be so terribly hot? Why did her pity for this child feel like commiseration, when she would see Luis again in only a couple of hours? Why did Penny continue to like her, to send her more and more dishes and to tell her, through Luis, that what she had to do to bear it was to eat lots of spicy food, that it would thin her blood? To lay a wet cloth on her chest at night? If only Penny would leave her alone, Annika told herself, she didn’t think she would have to feel very guilty at all.

The next morning there was a lull in customers after nine. Bobbie came into Annika’s cubicle to tell stories. Today she was describing the details of every formal dress, down to the stitching and the cut of the crinoline sleeves, that she had ever worn to a dance when she was a young lady growing up in Palestine, Texas. From Lizette’s cubicle came the sound of old blues music on the radio. The singer played his guitar high and snappy and sang about a bourgeois man and a bourgeois gal in a bourgeois town. The man’s voice was hard and smart and Annika could recognize it as one of the famous ones, but still she was surprised they were playing the song on the radio, as it had the word “nigger” in it.

Bobbie was a gruff loving woman with a slim tan face and white-blue eyes. A head shorter than Annika, almost a foot shorter than Lizette, Bobbie liked to talk to Lizette and Luis and Annika even when they were up at the counter taking key authorization slips from the faculty members and graduate students and maintenance workers, and punching their social security numbers into the computers. Bobbie had been here for thirty years. She knew more about Locks and Keys than anyone alive, and the big-wigs at Facilities Management knew it. When she had come up for retirement last year, they’d offered her some big money to get her to stay.