Her loud snores would bring her halfway through the curtain of awareness and she'd look for the runner. She turned her head and hawked a gob of tobacco-brown spit out in an arc above the railing. Splatters fell like Roman Candle sparks in flight.
Carlos became her third husband after Javier and that guilt was a stone in her breast. Carlos had been his closest friend.
Carlos would come by and stand shyly on her porch, resisting her invitations to sit. He'd turn red as the flowering cactus, stammering his way into her heart. One high-mooned June night she persuaded him to share a cerveza because it was hot and she said she was frightened of the howl of the wolves. He became her lover long before Javier was found dead in the hills by the border.
Yolanda didn't want any more trouble. She focused out to the western sky. Maybe the man had his own worries. Maybe he was hungry. She wasn't sure it was a man that bobbed through the shimmering heatwave of road though it was likely. No woman ran so alone and free.