There’s something about hot weather that makes Beverley Lightfoot think of finding her husband’s clothes in the trash.

It was sweltering, just like today, when she locked eyes with a skinny coyote, lifted the lid of her neighbor’s garbage can and saw her husband’s shirt—the plaid one she’d got him for his thirty-fifth birthday—flecked with old eggshells, discarded coffee grounds and bloodstains.

She blinks away the image, tilts the rearview mirror and splays her hands across the steering wheel, lifting her fingers to inspect nails she carefully painted just this morning, an innocuous carnation pink. She frowns, leans in, sure she can see the polish bubbling in the heat.

The surrounding sidewalks are fringed with gasping palms and packed tightly with bodies in capri pants and sleeveless sweaters. This type of insistent heat—so stubborn that it radiates from the buildings, the crosswalks—sends folks’ heads into a spin, especially in Berryview, where there is no coastal breeze, not even the mildest gust to shoo off the muggy stink of summer.

It has been this way for weeks: a meteorological standoff, the papers running headlines of record temperatures alongside stories of planes bombing Hanoi. CITY SWELTERS! they cry hysterically. THOUSANDS MORE KILLED IN ‘NAM.

Salesmen have taken the weather as a cue to knock on Beverley’s door. They come with freestanding fans, with bulky Coleman coolers, with ice machines balanced on their hips, their damp hair palmed back, their grins twitching with the knowledge that they have access to treasure. Once Beverley has politely dismissed them, she will lean out of the porch. In every manicured front yard, behind white fences and blowsy hibiscus, she will see the same thing: men standing wide legged, with open shirts—just like the one she found in the trash that day—soaked through by the spray of their garden sprinklers.