Free B0061QB04W EBOK by Reyna Grande

don’t even know something as basic as the size of our shoes and clothes, what else don’t they know about us? And what don’t we know about them?
    The question was there, but neither Carlos, Mago, nor I was courageous enough to ponder on it for long. As the oldest, it was clearer to Mago, more than to Carlos and me, that the distance between us and our parents was destroying our relationship more than any of us could have imagined. And the consequences would be great. But back then, as our little mother, Mago’s job was to take care of us and to shelter us from the reality that only she could fully grasp. I had her as a buffer, but she had no one but herself.
    “Come on, Nena, let’s wash our feet,” she said. So we washed away the dirt caked on our feet and we put on the beautiful shiny shoes. “Curl your toes inward,” Mago said to me. I curled my toes and that way the shoes didn’t hurt as much.
    Mago, Carlos, and I held hands and we started spinning around in a circle, turning and turning, blending into a blur of purple, pink, white, and blue. Then, without letting go, we ran out of the house, out into the street, laughing and crying at the same time.
    And as we ran past Don Bartolo’s store, then cut across the vacant lot, then headed to the church, past the tortilla mill, and Don Rubén’s little house, everyone stared at our beautiful new clothes, and not once did anyone say, “Poor little orphans.” Our neighbors admired our pretty clothes and shoes from afar, not knowing that by the time we got home our feet would be covered with blisters.

8
    The Man Behind the Glass
    M Y FATHER HAD told us about his dream house in the letters he’d sent to my mother from El Otro Lado. The house was made of brick with a shiny concrete floor and tall wide windows to let in the sunlight. The walls were painted the color of Mami’s blue eye shadow, and it had three rooms.
    Papi’s dream house had a television, a stereo, a refrigerator, and a stove. It was a house with electricity, gas, and running water, and maybe even an indoor bathroom, one with a shower that made you feel as if you were standing in the rain on a sticky, hot summer day. That was the house that my father dreamed of.
    Back then, I didn’t know that Guerrero was the Mexican state with the most people emigrating due to the scarcity of jobs. I hadn’t known that a year before he left, my father had already been leaving home to find construction work in Acapulco, Mexico City, evenas far as Mazatlán, Sinaloa, until eventually making his way farther north.
    At first, he had lived in California’s Central Valley and had slept in an abandoned car while working in the fields harvesting crops, just as he had done in his youth. Eventually he left to try his luck in Los Angeles, where he was fortunate enough to find himself a stable job as a maintenance worker at a retirement home.
    Four years after my father left for the United States, and two years after my mother left, the construction of our house finally began. Back then, I interpreted this to mean one thing—Papi and Mami would soon be back!
    Abuela Evila gave my father a piece of her property, which meant that our house was going to be built right next to hers. It wasn’t something Mago, Carlos, and I were happy about. Who wanted to live next to Abuela Evila? Not us. But because it would cut down on the final costs, it was the only option my parents had. Besides, as he would later tell me, my father had helped his parents pay for the mortgage on their property with the wages he had earned since he was nine years old. Really, it was only fair for him to get a piece of that land. If only he had realized he was making a mistake, building a house on a property that was not under his name.
    Workers came early one morning to tear down the outhouse and the shack in which I was born. Both the shack and the outhouse were made of bamboo sticks, so it didn’t take long to get rid of them. I stood there