It was a rainy Sunday morning  in October and the sky was grey and dark and thick with clouds.   The thunder startled Dan who was always on edge and made him spill his coffee on his couch and all over the framed picture of his younger brother Todd who he had not seen ever since he was lost at sea exactly a year ago.

He wiped the coffee off the couch with a towel, thinking to himself how much he missed his brother.   Then he heard a voice in his head.  “Use a regular towel to clean up your mess – not a paper towel”  – that is what  Esperanza, his beautiful dark haired Argentine wife always used to say with an accent.   Since she left, Dan was always spilling something and had to wash a lot of towels.   Not that he cared anymore what Espi used to say -- he called her Espi, even though she hated it, he was to find out.

They had met in traffic court six years ago.  She looked at him and smiled.   He came out of it with a lunch date, and not long afterwards they were married.

Wiping up the coffee stains, he thought about the time they were sitting at the bar in the lobby of The Coronado Hotel only eight months ago.  She was holding Dan tight and crying and saying she loved him.  She looked so beautiful and he wondered how he was so lucky.   One week later Esperanza took their three year old son Duardo and left for Argentina to visit her mother.  Days later she emailed Dan and said that they were not coming back. 

Dan could not understand.  There were no warnings.  He wondered if Espi left him for that Spanish matador, El Guapo, who she had lived with in Spain briefly before she moved to the U.S. and met Dan, and who seemed to always reappear.  He never understood how she could have fallen for someone who went to work wearing tights and stabbed large animals, and it made him grind his teeth to even think about El Guapo.

Since that day she left eight months ago, Dan was barely able to work.  His dissertation was in shambles and he could not focus.  He barely slept and ate only Hershey bars.  His apartment was a mess and what little money he had he was now spending on lawyers.

The only happy moment since Espi fled was Dan’s high school reunion a month ago.  His good friend Jerry forced him to go.  “Go,” Jerry said, “it will be good for you.”  Dan was surprised to see Roberta Miller there sitting at a table eating stuffed mushroom caps.  He had not seen her in fifteen years.  Her hair was still red and long. He remembered when they were twelve years old sitting one summer behind a cabin near Dead Bone Lake.  They were spinning around and around on a merry go round and then something came over him and he grabbed and kissed Roberta until he got dizzy from the spinning and threw up all over her.   He always had a crush on Roberta.  They went for a drink after the reunion party ended and Roberta asked Dan to call her sometime.  But he was just such a mess now.  I should call Roberta, he would say to himself, she could be a good friend.   It would have to wait.  He had more urgent plans.

Dan wiped the coffee stains off the couch and carpet gently with a towel, hearing Espi in his head telling him to press, not wipe, and not too hard, and not to step on the wet spot.

The courts in Argentina were useless.  Over the past week Dan had decided to go to Argentina and find them.  His best information was that Duardo and Espi were living in the town of Tapalque, about two hundred kilometers southwest of Buenos Aires.   That is where he was going to go in two days.  

First he would see his lawyer Otto Foy Monday morning.  Foy was plump and wore a pinky ring and a bow tie, and had a bald head that shined like a washed apple.  Dan didn’t particularly like him, and Foy told Dan not to go to Tapalque.  It did not make sense.  Dan had not even met the lawyer Foy hired in Buenos Aires, Alfredo Fransisco Jesus de Goya, and he wanted to speak with him face to face. 

In planning his trip though his fears confronted him.  He was afraid of being hijacked.  Ever since the ship his brother Todd was working on was hijacked near Somalia a year ago, Dan was afraid to travel.  He was especially afraid of flying.

Still, Dan was going to Tapalque.  Whether big Otto or anyone else liked it or not. He finished cleaning the spilled coffee, pulled a suitcase out of the closet, and started to pack.