Paula’s replacement appeared on the Monday of my second week — Yolanda, youthful, solid, Salvadorean, plump as a partridge, brisk and ruthless as a buzz saw. Dierdre’s already numbered days at H&C were now even fewer. Yolanda and Lara immediately put their heads together and the balance in the com room became overwhelmingly young, Hispanic, and hostile towards white-haired old gringas. They chattered in Spanish as Yolanda pinned up pictures of her own little girl and they traded stories about her boyfriend and Lara’s husband.

The situation in the com room deteriorated, the hostility between Dierdre and the other two becoming more and more palpable. One day, Dierdre flatly refused to do something when Lara asked her, saying, “Ask Yolanda or Jinx, they’ll do it,” then marched upstairs. Yolanda told me about this, her voice low and excited. According to her, Lara retreated into shocked silence at her computer, trying not to cry. After a few minutes Lara went off to speak quietly to Portia. I was very glad I wasn’t there. That was Dierdre’s last day.

Yolanda had a mordant streak, describing with relish a movie she’d seen with a graphic description of someone getting run over by a bus. She also went into gruesome detail about her own difficulties with her daughter’s birth while poor Lara, a first time mother, clapped her hands over her ears and cried out “No! It’s cruel! It’s cruel!”

In spite of this, Yolanda seemed vaguely phobic about death. When I was showing her the storeroom where the party supplies and toners are kept, she reacted with horror to a hunting trophy, a moth-eaten wild duck crucified on the shadowy back wall. Every time she had to go in there, she would shudderingly avoid looking at it. Later, as she was cleaning off Paula’s desk, a book fell from the top shelf, and she reacted with exaggerated wonder and fear. (The notion of Paula as a poltergeist was too ridiculous for me to even contemplate.)

I resisted the urge to tell Yolanda that sometimes, when I was alone in the com room, I would hear a faint “Quack, quack, quaaaaack” coming from the store-room.