Dad towered above, hands on his hips, sunlight filtering through a cross-hatch of sycamore branches, his smooth, pink scalp illuminated and glistening with sweat.

Osvaldo and his homies’ favorite party spot was a place they called The Edge, on the rim of the Río Grande Gorge.

My body didn’t care that I had known he would die. My body planned to relive that moment often in the months to follow. My body had a memory that wouldn’t quit.

Edward often searched for himself in Houraye’s hands. Soft, nut brown hands he marveled at,

“If it rains in the dead garden, will the dead people drown?”

Gnats clustered in noiseless aureoles about Jeannie’s father’s head as he dipped water from the barrel on the back of the flatbed truck and drank it in a tin cup.

Where to begin? How about right now?

The Silk City Police Department. I am waiting in the police station in an interrogation room for my father to show up.

Before he left the Philippines to move in with his son, the American doctor, Titong made a bargain with himself: He would burn cigarettes on the tip of each finger before going back to his old ways. Yet, here he was, in his granddaughter’s room, beside her bed, in the middle of the night.

We peeled off our rain gear at the back door of the Grant’s Pass Hotel, wrung the water out of our gloves, and traded our muddy boots for sneakers and moccasins. It wasn’t dark, but it might as well have been.

When I was in college it was known as guerilla theatre. I saw a lot of it in Harvard Square – activists in mawkish costumes dramatizing social and political issues, small crowds of curious pedestrians stopping to hear diatribes like . . .