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For a moment I had to convince myself I had seen what I had seen.

“What I was thinkin‘,” he continued, gulping some more of his beer and not waiting for me to respond, “is I might have the woman I love tattooed with the rest of it. Then, whenever we stood naked together, we would have the whole song between us. Huh?”

He looked at Mother darling and then at me and burst into laughter.

“Look at her face, Kay.”

Mother darling did, and then she laughed, too.

“Let’s call the boys and tell them to come over earlier. We want to get this thing goin‘.”

He looked at me again and sang, “My heart will cry for you.”

Then he put his arm around Mother darling and went out to the living room to call his fellow musicians.

If anyone’s heart’s crying, I thought, it’s mine.

Before the musicians arrived, I left the apartment to explore what looked like it would be my new neighborhood for some time to come. Down on the lower level, in front of the apartment closest to the street, I saw a girl who looked about my age, with licorice black hair tied in a ponytail. She was sitting on a lawn chair and seemed to be singing to whatever was coming through her earphones. She wore a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off to her shoulders and jeans. I thought the T-shirt was splattered with red paint, until I drew closer and saw the red dots were all connected to form a pair of lips. Underneath it read, Don’t Give Me Any Lip.

When we made eye contact, she took off her earphones.

“Quien esta usted?”

“Excuse me?”

?

?I asked you who you were in Spanish. That’s what I’m doing with these earphones, learning Spanish.”

“Oh.”

“So?”

“What?”

“So who are you, or is that a secret?”

“My name’s Robin Taylor,” I said, making sure to leave out the Lyn. “My mo… sister and I are staying with a friend for a while.”

“Quien?”

“What?”

“I thought you might have figured it out by now. Who? Quien? Get it?”

“I don’t speak Spanish,” I said sharply. I was just going to keep going, but she leaped out of her chair.

“Neither do I. That’s why I’m studying it.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to run off to Mexico and live on a beach and drink tequila and not care what time it is, ever,” she vowed. I guess I looked pretty skeptical. “I am!” she insisted. She looked back at the front door of her apartment. “I’m tired of my stepmother telling me what to do, what to wear, what to eat. My father never says anything. She’s got him wrapped around her you-know-what.”

This time I smiled.

“Quien esta usted?” I asked, and she broke into a wide smile.

She had a round face that made her dark brown eyes look too small. Heavy boned, she looked a good twenty pounds overweight. It gave her a more matronly look, especially with her big bosom and wide hips. I imagined that when she said her stepmother was telling her what to eat, she was trying to get her to lose weight.