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I decided to leave Brazil at the end of my visiting teaching contract at the university. I couldn’t face looking for another apartment, and poor Rita had endured far more than could be expected of any friend. I was originally from the Pacific Northwest, where my biological family still lived, so I began to look for teaching positions near Seattle. Perhaps there, I thought, I would find solidity.

After I told Jorge of my plans, his family invited me to a good-bye lunch. I ran from the bus to their house through a tropical downpour, the streets running with mud, each one a small, silted torrent. I sprinted from shop to shop, leaping over the sewage and garbage that came sliding into the road with the mud. It was no surprise that entire communities slid away during Salvador’s rainy seasons.

Jorge’s family was their usual joyous collective. But then they brought in little Mauro. He looked very skinny. He leapt onto my lap; I touched his slender arm but said nothing. Zezé noticed my glance.

“Did you not know?” she said. “João got shot, two months ago. He and friends were coming home from watching Olodum at a music show. They were waiting by a bus stop at the center, and there was a man fighting with a woman. João, like everyone else, went over to look. Then the man turned around and shot him.”

Mauro wrapped his arms around my neck. I remembered João with this boy on his shoulders, running down the street, pretending to be a horse, Mauro screaming with laughter, the neighbors egging him on. João told clever stories and terrible jokes. He was always proudest of the bad jokes.

“What did the police do?” I asked.

“Nothing. The killer—he was middle-class—said João assaulted him and he shot in self-defense. Many people came forward as witnesses, saying that João was only a passing spectator, that the murderer killed for no reason, but,” Zezé began laying the table for lunch, “none of those giving evidence were middle-class, so the police ignored them.”

“So they did nothing? The man never went to prison?”

Zezé smiled at me and ruffled Mauro’s head. “And this is a pain,” she said. “Since the death he just keeps getting thinner and thinner.”

Jorge walked in with his new girlfriend. She looked about fifteen. After lunch, he and I drank a coffee together on their front verandah that overlooked the street.

“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” I asked.

“Lucinha. Pretty, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. Pretty young.”

“She’s sixteen. But she’s very smart, Margaret. She wants to finish high school, go to university and become a doctor.”

“What grade’s she in now?”

“Six. She works as a maid and goes to school at night. We only get to see each other on Sunday.”

“What happens if she gets pregnant?”

Jorge looked at me with mock horror and laughed. “We’re not having sex yet.”

“Really?”

“Really. I want to support her, help her become a doctor. She can read really well, Margaret. Maybe I haven’t done so well, but I think I can help her do what I haven’t.”

“You’re pretty smart, Jorge. And what about capoeira? You aren’t coming to practice anymore. What’s up with that? You and Gato are the best, you know. You could be a teacher, make money that way.”

“Yeah.” Jorge fidgeted, pulling on his fingers. “I’m doing weight training now. I get so tired. I’m working as a porter at the school now. It pays eighty dollars a month, so I have to work during the day too. I help a mechanic down the road.” We sat in silence a moment or two, sipping on our coffee. Steam rose off the dirt street as the heat dried the mud.

“I want to build a place of my own,” Jorge said, “where Lucinha and I can live, so I can move out of my parents’ house. When I’m not working or sleeping, I want to spend time with Lucinha. And capoeira costs money—for the bus. Our teacher doesn’t pay me when I teach for him. And I have to pay for the bus both ways.”

“Yeah. I can see that. That’s hard.”

Jorge got up and shouted at Mauro, who was now in the street playing. “Did you hear about Agnaldo?” he asked me.

“No.”

“He died.”

I sat