On Friday thunderheads are boiling up from the coastal plain and slicing open their bellies on the craggy peaks. Beneath their wet embrace Chirbampo is shrouded in cold drizzle. Rain drips off the hotel eaves in torpid rivulets. Vehicles splash through water-logged potholes. The window is open a crack, letting the damp chill seep into the room.

Underneath the sheets Nick and I spoon indolently, our bare skin plastered with heat. He wraps me in his embrace, one arm flattening my already-flat chest, the other draped over my hip. I can feel his heartbeat tattoo my back and gently slow, his hardness melting. Occasionally my butt flinches, tickled by his pubic hair.

He’s talking in a voice like frayed velvet, his words a lazy reminiscence about Iowa. The sun sinking into an endless shimmering curve of corn tassels. Grain silos rising from snowdrifts. Jumping the railroad tracks on his big brother’s dirt bike. Clouds of bats shrieking overhead at dawn and dusk. The ghostly calm of abandoned farmsteads. Windmills that clank and glitter in the breeze. Trysts in the hayloft with his high school girlfriend. Ruthie, he lets slip.

I’m smiling into my pillow, caught up in the vision of a younger Nick in bucolic paradise, treasuring this insight into him. Then a question pricks my contentment. “Did you love her?”

He blows a long sigh into my hair, warming the nape of my neck. “I thought I did.”

“What happened?”

“Ruthie left for college. Bowdoin, of all fucking places. Way the hell out in Maine.”

I nip at his wrist playfully. “She wanted to get away from you that bad?”

“It wasn’t my fault. Bowdoin gave her a scholarship.” Nick’s laugh hovers between relief and resignation. “I was miserable for a couple months, and then I wasn’t anymore.”

“That’s when you met the next girl, huh?” Giggling, I try to rotate in his arms. “Did you love that one?”

His muscular embrace tightens, pinning me in place. “Let’s talk about what we’re doing today.”

“Besides this sex-type stuff?”

“Yeah. Besides several helpings of this sex-type stuff.” Suddenly his sweaty heat is gone. Nick escapes from bed and stands at the hotel window, arms folded and feet planted far apart. The pose is oddly regal, as if he’s the king of all he surveys — namely Chirbampo. “I’m giving you the responsibility of building a demographic profile of the town, before during and after the Korea Textile maquiladora. Who left to work at the maquiladora in Tijuana? Who stayed behind here in Chirbampo? Who came back after the maquiladora shut down? That kind of demographic profile.”

My body is all goosebumps and shivering without his warmth. I snatch a fleece pullover from the floor and shrug into it. “A demographic profile? I don’t even know what that is.”

“Just a fancy way of saying you analyze the census data for a given time and place. In Mexico the national census happens every 10 years, just like in the U.S., except here it’s bottoms-up instead of top-down. Mexican towns collect their own census data, then forward it to the state government, which forwards it to the federal government.” He glances over a naked shoulder at me. “Chirbampo keeps its original census data in the basement of the public library. You’ll love it down there. Trust me.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Not really,” Nick laughs, and goes back to his contemplation of the rainy street.

“What are you going to do while I’m slaving away in the library’s basement?”

“Keep interviewing people. I’m trying to learn more about Senor Reyes and what people think of him. He bought the Korea Textile maquiladora in Tijuana and offered people jobs there. That kept money flowing back to Chirbampo, since migrant Mexican workers always send part of their paychecks home. But it also lured the young and ambitious away, and when they married and started families it wasn’t here. Add it all up and what do you get?”

It’s one of his pop quizzes. I peer out from my cocoon of sheets, distracted by a mole that interrupts the muscular contour of his left buttcheek. I never noticed it before. “Ummm…”

“I’ll tell you what you get — a ghost town waiting to happen. A lot of old-timers and a few youngsters, mostly dependent on money from relatives in Tijuana or even America.” Nick shakes his balding head sadly. “This town is dead and they don’t even know it.”

Abruptly he marches into the bathroom. The tinkle of his peeing turns into a waterfall when he flushes the toilet. Meanwhile I hang on words that he already forgot saying. Send money back home. That’s what I should do. Sign over my checks from UCLA to my family. Help them repay the mahr that Saman’s family paid for me. Because this divorce is bigger than the girl I’m becoming, even bigger than five years of house arrest as a wife and daughter-in-law. Disappearing into Mexico with Nick changed everything, and nothing at all. The two families are still right where I left them, shamefully entangled by my flight from Saman, hating me more than ever.

The bedsprings creak. “Let’s sleep in for a while,” Nick whispers, a familiar embrace from behind. “The library doesn’t open until noon, anyway.” I relax and feel his stubbly cheek against my shoulderblade, feel his breathing ease into slumber…

When I close my eyes I can still see him in passionate abandon, hips churning into me, neck arched toward the ceiling — and afterward, when he stares down at me, his icy visage has melted into tenderness, or even vulnerability. I just want him to look at me that way forever. Forever and ever.

That image lingers in my fitful dreams, where we live fantastical adventures involving dirt bikes and windmill creatures and bat-clogged skies, escaping to make love in a corn-tassel bed. Later I’m awakened by the muffled report of a truck backfiring down on the cobblestones — and in waking Nick is still here, a solid warmth pooling into me, as if the dream never ended.