He bent over to shake the old man’s hand. The two of them didn’t kiss or embrace. They never had, and now that Travis was increasingly fragile, his son was grateful for their more formal routine.

“Like I’m running out of time,” Travis answered with uncharacteristic candor. “I want to get my memoirs done faster than my brain and hands will let me.”

Bobby nodded and smiled his practiced, understanding state-senator smile.

“Why don’t you let me get someone to help you?” he offered.

The people Bobby got to help his father were trained and efficient, and irksomely controlling. Travis had put up with their influx to this point because they were necessary, but he was beginning to feel that enough was enough.

“This is something I’ve got to do on my own,” he answered firmly.

Again, Bobby nodded empathetically.

“I completely understand, Dad. No one but you could do it. But you could have some helpers. You’d still be the one doing all the real work, but instead of having to write everything out, you could dictate. Other people could go through all those boxes of old material and bring the most important stuff to you. Think about it.”

Travis decided he would. The act of bossing people around had always appealed to him, which his son knew as well as anybody. Plus, it really couldn’t be denied that he’d work at a faster pace with some assistance. But he detected self-interest in his son’s suggestion, and this gave him pause.

“Maybe I will get some help,” Travis conceded. “Roy and the others have grandkids always looking for summer money—I’ll get some of them to pitch in.”

As suspected, Bobby Brayer greeted this solution with dismay.

“They won’t do as good a job as a skilled typist and researcher. I’ll get you someone, Dad. I’ll arrange the whole thing.”

Travis bet he would. He’d arrange it so that whatever Bobby wanted in or out of Travis’s memoirs would be controlled by this new employee. His son didn’t play straight and fair like a man should. He’d inherited his mother’s gift for manipulation. Travis was on to him.

“You understand I’m gonna write this book the way I want,” Travis said, taking the stern tone with his son that he’d perfected over forty years.

“Of course,” Bobby answered. “I’m just trying to help.”

Travis grunted.

“Isn’t everyone taking good care of you here?” Bobby pressed.

Travis grunted again.

His body was failing him by the day, and he could only hope that his mind wouldn’t follow suit. He’d lost his ability to walk, to relieve himself, even to breathe for long periods of time without a respirator. A small army of caretakers swarmed around him to keep him stretched and fed and alive, and he supposed he was grateful for this. He didn’t allow himself to consider the fact that he was actually dying. He kept thinking of old age as the flu—an illness he’d forgotten to inoculate against, but that he could recover from with enough rest and fluids. He honestly expected to wake up one morning a little bit younger than the day before, the first sign that he was on the road to recovery. Toward this end, he drank his juices and did his exercises and bore the indignities of being changed and washed by strangers. It was all temporary. He’d be on the mend soon enough.

“How’s the campaign going?” Travis asked.

Bobby looked out the window, past the orchard to the far-off pastures that rolled down to the river’s edge.

“We’re ten points down, but gaining,” he answered. “I need to cut another commercial, which is something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Travis nodded expectantly. He’d never been on television before, but he’d always believed he should be. Now it seemed his debut might be imminent.

“Would it be all right if I shot one here?” Bobby asked.

As he took a long pause to make it seem like he was considering the request, Travis reflected that it was too bad they couldn’t have filmed this commercial a few years ago, when he might’ve showcased his cattle-wrangling or tree-chopping skills. Travis used to engage in all kinds of manly, athletic activities, before his aging had telescoped his days into their current narrow confines. But he still felt capable of projecting a unique toughness, and he looked forward to the opportunity to impress a larger audience.

“I think that’d be fine,” he answered.

“Great, thanks. We’ll stay outside, totally out of your way. You won’t even know we’re here, I promise. It’ll take a full day, but if all goes well, you won’t hear a thing.”

“You don’t want me in it?” Travis asked incredulously.

Bobby hadn’t anticipated his father’s hurt.

“You’re in most of them already,” he replied. “They use those photos of me when I was younger, with you and Mother. You’ve seen them, you look great in them.”

Old photos, of course. Mug shots of better times, when Travis was revered, and sought after. This was clearly no longer the case. Other people were now firmly in charge, and the pain of this was brutal.

Rosa Gonzalez had worked a long, exhausting day in the hot Tortillas kitchen, after a sleepless night in which the baby had screamed every hour and a half. As the sun was setting, she finally stopped for a break. She escaped the heat of the kitchen to sit outside in one of her pretty new chairs and watch swallows swoop and swerve in plague-proportion swarms. She marveled at their synchronized, undulating waves and imagined she was at some kind of avian ocean’s edge.

Two trucks pulled up and broke her reverie. She didn’t recognize them, which was rare. Tortillas catered primarily to the Latino community within Fayeville. It wasn’t often that others wandered in, although Rosa assumed it would just take time to convince the rest of the town to give them a try. She knew her food was good. In America, all you needed was to be good and work hard, and success would follow. This is what she firmly believed.

Five young men piled out of the trucks, two out of the first, three from the second. They had tattoos and buzz cuts and looked like they hadn’t yet reached their twenties. Rosa briefly wondered if they might be soldiers since she knew that lots of young Fayeville men signed up for the armed forces. But there was an undisciplined air about this particular group that made her reconsider. She didn’t really care who they were or where they came from. If they were hungry, she would feed them.

Or she’d get Juan to feed them. She wasn’t quite recovered. She stayed seated, but greeted them with a smile.

“Hello!” she said brightly. “Welcome to Tortillas!”

She and Juan had argued about whether to give in to the erroneous local pronunciation of the name or to insist on the correct version. Rosa had advocated assimilation, saying it didn’t really matter and that they’d get more business if they didn’t turn people off by making them think they couldn’t talk right. Juan had insisted they pronounce it the way it was supposed to be pronounced. He assured her people would come around, that they might even enjoy learning a bit of Spanish.

“Tor-tee-yas?” one of the young men repeated. “What’s that mean?”

He had a tattoo of a bull with longhorns on his right upper bicep.

“They’re a little like thin pancakes, made with corn or flour. We make them with corn. You wrap chicken or beef in them. They’re delicious! Come inside and try.”

Whenever she had to explain what tortillas were to people, she felt secretly sorry for them, like they were sheltered children who’d been deprived of very basic knowledge available to everyone else. And sometimes she found people’s ignorance disingenuous. Who hadn’t heard of a tortilla, in this day and age? Still, she had to stay polite.

“They’re a little bit like hot dog buns, but for Mexican food,” Rosa continued, determined to connect with these potential new patrons. “Did you know hot dog vendors used to give people gloves to eat their hot dogs with to avoid burned hands? But people kept stealing the gloves, so one hot dog seller asked his friend, who was a baker, if he would bake some kind of edible glove that they could use instead. And his friend came up with the hot dog bun! Interesante, no?”