Chapter 10 Summary: Lore, 1983

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Chapter 10 opens with Andres calling Lore on a Friday, then again the following Wednesday, and again the next Friday. The calls settle into a rhythm, and Lore asks Andres to describe his office so she can picture him while they talk. This request becomes a game: they describe their childhood bedrooms, their current homes, and their histories to each other.

Lore describes the bedroom she shared with her older sister Marta—twin beds, a wooden dresser between them, Marta claiming the top drawers and Lore the bottom, and the closet where Lore tried on Marta's clothes while her sister was at Laredo Junior College. Andres describes an unshared bedroom, explaining that his parents struggled to conceive him and that his mother suffered four miscarriages after his birth. He tells Lore his mother always called him her miracle, and he admits with regret that he wishes he had treated her better before she died.

Andres reveals he lives in Tlatelolco, a massive housing complex in Mexico City, about fifteen minutes from the Centro Histórico. The name triggers a memory for Lore: her parents watching a staticky TV, snapping at the kids to be quiet. Andres explains the name refers to the 1968 massacre, when the Mexican army and police opened fire on thousands of unarmed student protesters. Lore remembers her father, a World War II veteran, shouting in anger and leaving the room. An estimated three hundred people died. Lore asks if Andres was there; he says no, that he has only lived in Tlatelolco for four years, since his divorce.

Andres tells Lore he has a fifteen-year-old daughter, Penelope, and a twelve-year-old son—the same ages as Gabriel and Mateo. His children stay with him every other weekend, alternating holidays, and for two weeks in the summer. Lore is struck by how American the custody arrangement seems. Andres mentions his ex-wife, Rosana, who also teaches at the UNAM. They married young, at twenty-four, a year after meeting and a year before Penelope was born. Lore nearly blurts out that she married at twenty but stops herself.

When Lore describes her home to Andres, she deliberately omits every trace of her family. She doesn't mention the boys' backpacks on the living room floor, their messy bedroom with grass-stained shorts and forgotten glasses of Coke, or the football-patterned wallpaper border. In her telling, Fabian's clothes disappear from the closet, the bed smells only of dryer sheets and her shampoo, and there is no razor at the sink, no cowboy boots by the door, no venison in the freezer, no truck in the driveway. The home she describes is sterile and lonely. She recognizes this as a systematic erasing of her family, and it feels like tempting fate—as if she is whispering to the universe that she wants them gone, which isn't true.

This fear of invocation connects to her postpartum experience. For months after giving birth, Lore spent sleepless hours weeping silently while staring at her newborn sons, imagining their possible deaths one by one. She believed she had to conjure every excruciating detail in her imagination to protect them in reality. One night, she fell asleep with Mateo breastfeeding beside her in bed. Gabriel's shriek woke her, and she saw that Fabian, still snoring, had stretched a heavy arm across Mateo's face. Mateo's legs were kicking, mottled red. Lore shoved Fabian's arm away and drew Mateo to her chest, too shocked to cry. She later stroked Gabriel's head and whispered that he had saved his brother, convinced his scream was not a coincidence. After that, she forced herself to stop imagining her sons' deaths, sure she had invoked the danger. She feels the same way now about erasing her family with Andres.

The calls are short, and Lore confines thoughts of Andres to the edges of her days: idling in school pickup lines, during her rushed evening shower, and especially before falling asleep, when time belongs to her alone. Memory quickly turns to fantasy. She imagines riding the caged elevator at the Gran Hotel with Andres, curling her hands around the iron bars, staring down at dancing wedding guests as he lifts the red silk of her dress. She imagines the crowd below stopping and looking up.

Lore tells herself everyone fantasizes. Men have their magazines, and there is a walled compound of brothels, strip clubs, and cantinas three miles south of the border, nicknamed Boy's Town. But women have no such spaces, only the force of their imagination. And that is all Andres is to Lore—a figment, despite the phone calls.

The chapter then shifts to Lore's romantic history. Fabian had three girlfriends before meeting Lore and slept with one of them. Lore had only ever kissed one boy before him, in a truck that smelled like dirty socks and stale Whataburger fries. She told Marta about the boy's dry lips and darting tongue, asking if that was what kissing was always like. Marta laughed and said bad kissers are bad in all kinds of ways. At sixteen, Lore decided to kiss as many boys as possible to identify the anatomy of a kiss, in the name of science. But before she could begin, she met Fabian on a double date with her friend Jenny. Fabian became her second kiss, a tooth-to-tooth fumble during The Graduate. After initial disappointment and self-doubt, they laughed, and Fabian leaned in again. This time was different—he kissed her slowly, touched her tongue gently with his, as if asking permission. Fabian always tilted his head to the left, so Lore learned to tilt hers the same way. Over the years, their kisses became less frequent and more intentional. Now, if Fabian's lips opened beneath hers, it meant he wanted sex; otherwise, he kissed her chastely, with glancing affection no more intimate than a stranger's accidental graze.

Lore thinks they are too young for this, but after sixteen years together—nearly half her life—she wonders what other people's marriages are like behind closed doors. She reflects that marriage is a temple that protects its own secrets. Despite her adolescent curiosity, she has never strayed. She considers herself lucky to have met the love of her life before the world could harden them against each other. She knows she could have had any number of men in Mexico City hotel bars, but she has never even considered it. She loves her husband and her sons and would never compromise her life with them.

And yet here she is, with thoughts of Andres crowding her mind as she makes pancakes, checks pre-algebra homework, folds laundry, takes the boys to basketball and track, makes small talk with stay-at-home moms who judge her for working, cooks dinner (which she hates), cleans the kitchen because Fabian's father never lifted a finger and this is now her burden, listens to Fabian talk about the store's abysmal sales, and brainstorms ways to get customers through the doors—ideas Fabian automatically rejects. Finally, when the boys are showered and asleep, she is grateful Fabian is too distracted and upset for sex, because it means she can close her eyes and conjure Andres, who is all too real.

The chapter then moves to Rivera Iron Works, a thousand-foot showroom attached to an aluminum-sided warehouse off McPherson Road. Fabian was proud to open in this newer part of Laredo; it was symbolic, a way of telling the city that Rivera Iron Works would grow with it. He hand-forged the ironwork for the showroom's double doors, each scroll curling into a gold leaf—growth, new life—protecting the frosted glass behind them. At the ribbon cutting, Lore stood at his right shoulder, and the LMT photographer captured the moment of his pride in the store and her pride in him.

On this Saturday morning in October, there are only four cars in the lot. Fabian has let two more employees go since laying off Juan in August. Now it's Fabian, one fabricator, one saleswoman (Olga), and the bookkeeper—a skeleton crew, as he calls them, for ghost customers. Olga greets the boys and gives them chile-covered mango lollipops. Gabriel and Mateo head to the warehouse to ride their skateboards down the ramps, keeping an awed distance from the fabricators' work.

This used to be their Saturday ritual: Lore and the boys picking up Fabian for lunch at Shakey's Pizza, plates piled high with pepperoni pizza, fried chicken, and spaghetti from the lunch buffet, the boys hovering over arcade games while Lore and Fabian relaxed with cold Coors and old Charlie Chaplin movies. They haven't done it in months, but the fridge is empty and Lore thought it would be a nice surprise.

In Fabian's office, he squints at his IBM monitor, though he prefers working on paper. Lore insisted computers are the way of the future. Fabian rubs his bloodshot eyes and asks when it will end. Lore asks if he will have to let anyone else go, thinking of Olga, who has four kids and a disabled husband. Fabian says not if he can avoid it, especially this time of year. Lore suggests hiring an ad company for visibility. Fabian dismisses the idea, asking what the point of visibility is when people who see you can't afford to buy anything. Lore bristles and says the point is reaching people who can afford to buy.

Fabian then reveals his actual idea: Austin. Things are still moving up there, homes are being built. He could go meet with builders, form relationships, maybe open a new location. Lore is stunned—hiring an ad person is ridiculous, but opening a second location four hours away is reasonable? Fabian says he didn't think she'd like it. Lore points out she works full-time and would have to take care of the boys on her own for months. Fabian says he'd come down whenever he could, and reminds her they have parents and her sister Marta and Sergio, who love spending time with the boys. Lore is stung, noting that Marta, after trying so long to have children, wouldn't want to help raise someone else's kids.

Fabian reveals he has already talked to Joseph Guerra, an old classmate from Martin, who has a guest room. Lore realizes Fabian's mind was made up before she walked into his office. He asks her to come in on Fridays to run payroll, go over the general ledger on Saturday mornings, and stop in occasionally so Olga and the guys know someone is still in charge. Lore feels the heat spread in her chest like blood from a wound. She says this doesn't feel like partnership—it feels like abandonment. Fabian insists they're supposed to be partners. Lore suggests diversifying, but Fabian snaps that all anyone here needs is work, that they're a bunch of starving dogs circling each other. Lore thinks of the warehouses the bank has leased, filling up with vehicles and mobile homes, whole cities on wheels locked away. She knows he's right. She picks up her purse and asks when he leaves. He doesn't hesitate: tomorrow.

Key Events

• Andres and Lore establish a phone-call game of describing their lives to each other, including childhood bedrooms and current homes.

• Andres reveals he lives in Tlatelolco, site of the 1968 massacre, and that he is divorced with two children near the ages of Lore's sons.

• Lore describes her home to Andres while systematically erasing every trace of her husband and sons.

• Lore recalls her postpartum fears and the night Fabian's arm nearly smothered baby Mateo, which she attributes to Gabriel's scream.

• Lore fantasizes about Andres at the Gran Hotel, then reflects on the lack of spaces for women's desire compared to men's.

• Lore recounts her romantic history: only one kiss before Fabian, her plan to study kissing, and how Fabian became her second kiss.

• Lore brings the boys to Rivera Iron Works for their old Saturday lunch ritual, only to find the store struggling with a skeleton crew.

• Fabian proposes opening a second location in Austin, four hours away, and leaving the next day.

• Fabian asks Lore to run payroll and oversee the ledger in his absence; Lore reluctantly agrees.

Character Development

Lore is caught between two selves in this chapter. On the phone with Andres, she constructs a version of her life without her family, then immediately recoils from the implications of that erasure. Her postpartum history—the obsessive imagining of her sons' deaths, the near-suffocation of Mateo, and her belief that Gabriel's scream was providential—explains her fear of invocation and her need to control what she conjures in her mind. Her fantasy life with Andres is a deliberate escape hatch, but she insists it is only that. Her history with Fabian, from their first kiss to the current chaste pecks, shows a marriage that has cooled into routine. When Fabian announces his Austin plan, Lore's anger is real, but so is her resignation. She recognizes that his mind was made up, and she agrees to take on the store's books even as she feels abandoned.

Fabian is presented as a man under economic pressure, with bloodshot eyes and a store that is failing. His proposal to open in Austin is both a business gamble and an escape from a situation he can't fix. He has already talked to Joseph Guerra, revealing that he planned this before consulting Lore. His insistence that they are partners rings hollow to Lore, who sees the arrangement as abandonment. Yet his earlier teaching of the ledger—his insistence that no one take advantage of her—shows a protective instinct beneath his single-mindedness.

Andres remains largely a voice on the phone, but his details accumulate: the Tlatelolco apartment, the divorce, the custody arrangement, the regret about his mother. He is a figure of imagination for Lore, but also a real person with his own history of loss.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Erasure of family life: Lore's deliberate omission of her husband and sons from her self-description is the chapter's central act. She recognizes it as a form of tempting fate, connected to her postpartum fear that imagining harm could invoke it.

Fear of invocation: Lore's belief that she must imagine every possible death to protect her sons, and her later conviction that she caused the near-suffocation by imagining it, drives her anxiety about erasing her family with Andres.

Fantasy as escape: Lore's Gran Hotel fantasy is a deliberate, contained escape—an