If Mr. Clean were allowed to age he’d look like Jock. Tall, shaved head with broad shoulders, but a golf pro’s weathered face and legs that bow out – the result of long ago football injuries. At fifty-three, Jock wed Amelia, a native of Chile, and though he knew some Spanish from his own dogged pursuits, it wasn’t until he brought her to his home in Boxborough that he resolved to learn more. “It just wouldn’t be fair to her.” Often when I talk to his wife, Jock translates.

Yesterday it was time to work on his deck, and as I walked past his open slider I heard, “Work, I love work. I can watch it all day long. I think I’ll bring my chair out here so I can watch your skinny ass slaving away.” Yeah, the funny thing was not so much that he noticed my skinny ass, but that he said something about it.

“While you’re watching me work, tell he how you learned to speak Spanish long after your brain had fossilized. My son’s in Nicaragua (I tell everyone about Matt and Hil), and he’s studying Spanish four hours every morning. He, I understand, but you…?”

“I picked up a thirty year old Spanish vocabulary book and I married it. Conjugated the verbs, completed the lessons and so on. But you know what helped me most? I stopped being afraid of making mistakes. They don’t care if you make mistakes, they enjoy it, it shows you are trying.”

I don’t know who the “they” is he was referring to. Maybe all the Spanish speakers in the world, or more likely, Amelia’s friends and family.

“I don’t care how much you study. If you’re not willing to practice it, you won’t be any good. When I made a mistake that I was aware of, or couldn’t think of the right word, I’d say, I’m a little bit embarazado. I made many mistakes, I repeated it often, A little bit embarazado’. Do you know what embarazado means?”

Wanting to impress him with my own grasp of a foreign language, I paused for a moment and replied, “Sure, it means embarrassed.”

“ No, it means pregnant. I kept repeating, ‘ I’m a little bit pregnant.’ “

As planned, we called Matt at 6 Pm to sing Happy Birthday, but no one answered. We checked the country code and dialed again, but no answer. We thought it terribly unlikely that out of a family of ten (eleven with Matthew), that the house would be empty. This time Diane found Egdelina’s original email and compared it to the phone number on her typed piece of paper. It matched, we dialed again, no answer. We were about to give up when the phone rang. It was Matthew calling from his cybercafe, four blocks from his house.

“Matt we tried to call but the phone just rang and rang.”

“I know. I was home, but the phone is in a room and when they are not home they lock the door. I could hear it ring, but I couldn’t answer it. It broke my heart.”

At 5:20 this morning, Matt and Hil boarded a bus that will take them on this road to Miraflor