Coconut Flan

Somehow, after the plane landed though before Andrés and Daria reached the taxi stand, Daria's wallet went missing.

- CATHERINE LACEY

Upon realizing that it was gone, Daria felt an impulse to dump the contents of her bag onto the ground and search for it, as it seemed to her that lost things might magically reappear if she indulged some childish impulse that she, a grown woman, was often trying to refrain from indulging.

The wallet wasn't quite a wallet, actually, but, rather, a black leather pouch large enough to comfortably hold her passport, residencia card, credit card, debit cards, Metrobús card, and house keys, as well as a small Polaroid of Andrés, two pens, and seven thousand pesos in cash. This was the litany that she, in her faltering Spanish, and he, in his native Spanish, repeated at the airline counter, the airport information desk, in the security department, the luggage department, and then to various voices on the phone. They described the thing that had been lost, and all the things inside the thing that had been lost, recited this list like a prayer, or a spell.

Walkie-talkies were spoken into. There were silences, longer silences, "no news yet"s, then, definitively, no news at all. "But the passport, the residencia, the passport, the residencia," Daria kept repeating, increasingly pathetic. "Why would a stranger want my identification?"

"I think you should call the Embassy," Andrés said.

"The Embassy?"

What was an embassy, really, and what did it do? Calling the Embassy was something that rich people did. People called the Embassy when they had friends at the Embassy, college buddies named Teddy, ambassadors who owed them a favor. No one owed Daria anything.