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  Earlier that morning on the bus, she had sat next to Tere, a girl who lived around the corner from the apartment, and she thought about telling her everything, the meals and talks they would have at his house, the way she started finding more work for herself so their afternoons wouldn’t end so quickly, the first time she thought he might be interested, the first time they kissed, the first time they were really together, but mainly about all the things that worried her now. After the bus dropped them off, she had another chance to tell her during the walk to the bridge and even during the walk to the other side, and then again when they were both waiting for their rides on the street. She didn’t tell her for two reasons: the first was that Tere was just a girl who lived around the corner from the apartment. They had spoken a handful of times when they happened to be on the same schedule or they ran into each other at the little store down the street, each buying something for her mother, but this was the extent of their friendship. Maybe she would’ve had someone to tell if she hadn’t spent all her time either working or at home. Which was the second reason she had stopped herself from saying anything to Tere: she didn’t want it getting back to her mother and aunt. Already she could hear them accusing her of offering herself to him. Explaining it wasn’t like that and that things had started innocently between them would do little to help her mother understand what had happened.

  She’d learned her lesson with Rogelio. The first years were difficult because of his temper, which seemed to be set off with the slightest disagreement. Her mother had told her to be more forgiving, that he would change once they had a family. It would be natural for him to want to be patient with their children. And perhaps this was true, but after four years she still wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t want to hear about her body. He didn’t want to know about her cycle or anything else that did not directly concern him. That was for her to talk about with other women. He was not a woman — he was her husband. And no, there was no money to go see a special doctor. If they were ever going to have a child, it would be the same way every other man and woman did it, not with the help of some doctor. And so she prayed for God to bring them the child they had been waiting for. The miracle happened shortly after their sixth wedding anniversary, only not for her. Rather than stay with him at his family’s house, she moved home. Her mother tried to convince her to go back, speaking of him as though nothing had changed and he was the same polite boy whose older brother and father had walked over to ask for her hand. The truth was she couldn’t stop blaming herself for his wandering and finding someone else who could give him what he wanted. With a baby on the way, he started crossing the river again to look for work. She never liked the idea of him swimming to the other side, but it had never been in his nature to agree with her, so as usual he continued doing whatever occurred to him. As time passed she came to accept that this baby and its mother were not going to change things: Rogelio was still her husband; she was still his wife. After a couple of weeks away, she decided she was ready to move back. She was waiting to tell him this when his naked body turned up, floating in the steady current beneath the bridge.

  Just thinking of that time made her want to leave the hospital. She stalled by looking inside the bag, pretending to search for some item she might have forgotten. After all this effort she knew she couldn’t leave now, not when it had taken her most of the morning to work up the courage to ask for a ride. Perhaps she’d imagined it, but it seemed as if la señora had hesitated, as if she might not have heard correctly — The cleaning woman wants a ride to the hospital so she can visit the man she works for? Socorro wrestled with the feeling that she might be stepping beyond what was considered acceptable or proper, and in this way revealing what he had wanted to keep private. She asked herself how it would look if she went to the hospital for any of the other people whose houses she cleaned, some for much longer periods of time, but then decided it was better to not wait around for the answer.

  She stood at the door, not wanting to interrupt what the doctor might be saying or wake the patient if he happened to be resting. Maybe she would just leave his clothes at the nurses’ station. When she did look around the corner, it was a nurse who was standing next to the bed and writing some notes on a metal clipboard. Don Celestino was lying back in the bed against a couple of pillows. His disheveled white hair from earlier that morning was now combed back in the way he normally wore it, and it looked as though he had shaved, maybe even trimmed the edges of his mustache.

  “Is that you, Socorro?” he asked, squinting through his tinted glasses. “You came all this way to visit me in the hospital?” He used both hands to adjust himself and sit up straight in the bed. “Look at how they attached all these wires to me. All I needed was to eat a good breakfast so my sugar would be back to normal again. Now they want to run some tests, just to be sure about my heart. Please, Socorro, tell this young man here that I have many more years left in me. Tell him Celestino Rosales is not going anywhere.” He held his hands out for her to come closer.

  She walked to the bed and kissed him on the cheek. It was a common enough gesture, one she had repeated countless times throughout her life, though never with anyone whose house she cleaned. And as his white whiskers brushed against her cheek, she wanted more than anything to believe that the differences in their ages and positions were gently being swept aside.

  7

  Salinas was coughing on the other side of the curtain. The greenish glow of the monitors added the only bit of light to the dark room. Don Celestino had briefly introduced himself when they’d brought the man in that afternoon. He might have spoken more to him then, but the man’s wife stayed around until late in the evening, leaning back in a recliner and watching novelas and talk shows. She wore at least one ring on almost every finger and a gold fifty-peso medallion that rested on her broad chest like the hood ornament on an expensive car. Occasionally she talked back to the philandering men or the scantily dressed women on the screen, but otherwise hardly any sound came from the other side of the retractable curtain. The few times he had caught a glimpse of Salinas, the man had looked back in a tortured sort of way.

  Sometime after midnight Don Celestino stepped off the bed to go relieve himself. He waved as he passed his neighbor’s bed, but the man was turned away as if trying to fall asleep.

  On his way back, he noticed him staring at the ceiling. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “Already for a long time,” Salinas said. “Maybe when that old woman of mine comes in the morning.”

  Don Celestino only nodded as he pulled along his IV unit and climbed into bed.

  “And you,” Salinas asked, “are you married?”

  “My wife died last year,” Don Celestino replied. “I’m alone now.”

  After a moment Salinas cleared his throat. “Forgive me.”

  Don Celestino fell in and out of sleep, for a time gazing out the window and later just lying there with his eyes shut. It struck him that if he were to pass during the night, his family wouldn’t be there to even notice he was gone. This was the same hospital where they had come when Dora had been feeling sick, and her doctor, after so many other tests, couldn’t figure out why she had become so bloated. It had taken opening her up to find that the cancer had by then spread throughout most of her stomach. One day he had been married more than half his life, and a few weeks later he was alone. And alone he had stayed for the first couple of months, rarely leaving the house and refusing to go see his children when they pleaded with him to at least come visit. A man who had never lived by himself and suddenly he was doing his own cooking and cleaning. It was his own illness that finally drew him out some. His doctor urged him to attend the diabetes classes and take control of the disease. For a few days he questioned if it might not be better to stay at home and ignore the new diet. With no one there to watch after him, it wouldn’t take long before his health declined. Which might have happened had the doctor not arranged for a nurse to come help him for the first couple of weeks, until he was co
mfortable with checking his sugar level and taking the insulin. Then his neighbor recommended a young woman who could come clean the house for him.

  Until their first afternoon together, he’d been afraid Socorro might see him only as the man who paid her $35 every week but beyond this had little interest in him. It had started this way, as a curiosity more than anything. Was she, could she ever be, interested in a man more than thirty years her senior? Not that he necessarily showed signs of his age (other than this unfortunate visit to the hospital). The fact that his hair had turned completely white on him when he was still in his fifties did little to change his overall appearance. The front still rose into what once might have been called a pompadour, though on a mature man he believed it presented more of a distinguished look. Whether it had been because of his appearance or his manner around her or his interest in her life outside of work, it had been enough to draw her closer to him. Since then, though, he hadn’t been sure what he was supposed to do next. He was, after all, supposed to be mourning the loss of his wife, who at the time had been gone only a few months.

  Close to an hour had passed when he heard a slight cough from the other side of the curtain. “Still awake?”

  “I thought this medicine was supposed to make you sleep,” Salinas answered. “You never know with these doctors.”

  “When I was a young man, we had different ways of curing a person.”

  “You see me here in this bed only because of my wife. She’s the one who has people on this side. I come from Saltillo.”

  “Close to Monterrey.”

  “You have come to visit the city?”

  “No,” Don Celestino said, “but my family came from Nuevo León, close to the town of Linares.”

  “For many years I had business in Linares.” Salinas used the control pad to adjust the bed into a reclining position. “Maybe I met some of your family.”

  “My grandfather came here sometime around eighteen fifty.”

  “Only yesterday, eh?” The man laughed to himself.

  “He used to tell us a funny story about how he was kidnapped by the Indians and brought here, over to this side.”

  “One of my uncles used to tell stories like that,” his neighbor said. “But you know how people like to talk, share stories about their families. One never knows whether to believe them, if they’re not just stories made up to pass the time.”

  “It always seemed made up to me, but my grandfather liked to say it was true about the Indians.”

  “And now all your family is from over here?”

  “From here, only that my daughters and my son moved away a long time ago.”

  “But you must have some other people that live close by?”

  For a second he considered mentioning his one remaining brother, but they hadn’t spoken in years. “I used to,” he said finally. “One of my daughters lives in Chicago and I have two more in San Antonio, and my son is close to Dallas, all with their own families.”

  “And they came to visit you here?”

  “I didn’t want to bother them — the doctor said he would let me go home soon, maybe tomorrow.”

  Salinas cleared his throat as if he were looking for something to say or maybe just the best way to say it.

  “When they were bringing me in this afternoon, I saw a young lady leaving the room.”

  “That was a friend of mine,” Don Celestino responded, hoping he wouldn’t have to say much more.

  “My wife would never let me have a friend like that,” he said, and shook his head.

  “For now that’s all she is.”

  “And someday,” Salinas said, “you think she might be more than your friend?”

  “There are some people who would think she was too young for a man like me.”

  “She looks young, but not too young. The better question is not whether she’s too young, but more whether you are too old.”

  Don Celestino gazed at the silhouette across the partitioning curtain. “That sounds like the same problem.”

  “Not really. If she’s too young, it means she is not mature enough and ready to give herself to you. But if you’re too old, it means you have nothing left to give her in return.”

  “And if we’re not living together, how am I supposed to know if I still have enough to give her?”

  His neighbor sat up a little more, tucking the pillow behind him. “Are you asking me how you find out if it will last, but without taking any risk?”

  “Something like that.”

  Salinas laughed to himself again. “Then what you really want to know is how to fry an egg when it is still inside the shell.”

  When Don Celestino didn’t answer, the man continued.

  “There’s nothing strange about wanting to avoid the risk,” Salinas said. “It only means you are human.”

  They quieted when a young nurse walked into the room. She smiled at Salinas and then pressed a series of buttons on his monitor; afterward she walked over and did the same to the machine near Don Celestino’s bed. He lay silently as the woman did her work. On the other side of the curtain, Salinas readjusted his bed to the horizontal position and a short while later fell asleep.

  Don Celestino stared out his window for some time after the nurse had left. He wondered if he shouldn’t have told the man more about his time with Socorro. Why should he be afraid to tell people? At least here he had a person who was willing to listen to him. Maybe Salinas would understand. Don Celestino had his children to consider, not that they were going to tell him how to live his life, but still he wanted their feelings for him not to be strained because he had found another woman, and a much younger one at that. And this wasn’t taking into account how soon it had all happened. Their mother in the ground only a few months and here he was with another woman in their same bed. And yet this other woman was the one who had come to visit him and the only one who would have known if anything more serious had happened to him. He wondered if he shouldn’t have let someone else know about his condition. It reminded him again of his brother, not that he and Fidencio had ever been so close, especially with how disagreeable the old man could be. A few months ago he’d heard that he was living in a nursing home. It had been more than ten years since they had talked, though, and as things turned out, this was probably for the best.

  The traffic lights flashed red against the condensation that had gathered on the windowpane. No one else knew about him, that was the point, no one except someone who he probably shouldn’t be thinking about so much. Maybe there was a reason that he had gotten sick, to remind him that he was old and she was not. He could have gotten sick any other day of the week, but it had happened the morning she would be at his house to witness them taking him away in the ambulance — half dressed and with his hair a mess — to see with her own eyes that he was old and she was not. To prove to her, and to him, that they had no business together, a young one with such an old one.

  He had lived a complete life, and somehow that life and the world he had lived in seemed so distant. There was a time when the boulevard just outside his window used to be a dirt road. People rode into Brownsville, some still in their wagons, and shopped at the Jimmy Pace Store. And even later there was Don José, who sold fresh bread from the back of his horse and buggy. This is the world he had come from. Now the four-lane thoroughfare was lined with businesses he had never stepped into: large grocery stores, gas stations, nightclubs, car lots, motels, restaurants, drive-through hamburger places, video stores, immigration offices. What not so long ago had been a gentleman’s club now announced on its marquee that Saturday was APOLLO MALE DANCER NIGHT. Never did he imagine seeing so many changes in his little town. His grandfather coming from a ranchito in Mexico couldn’t have experienced such a difference in his lifetime. What could there have been before a dirt road and one or two stores? How different could it really have been for him? He probably never so much as entered a hospital. Don Celestino could remember being five or six years old and the family ga
thering the evening when he passed away at the house. There must have been some connection, however tenuous, between the world he had arrived in and the one he saw before finally passing away. Lying there in the hospital bed, Don Celestino found it hard not to feel as if he were cut off from all that had come before him and, in some ways, all that still remained of his life.

  8

  Socorro stopped just as she reached the halfway mark on the bridge. After rifling through her purse, she uncovered the tollbooth receipt and read the day to make sure it said jueves, her usual day to clean his house. She was putting away the slip of paper when she noticed something move out from under the opposite side of the bridge. A Border Patrol agent in a green-and-white jeep cruised along the bank of the river and stopped alongside another agent in a jeep headed in the opposite direction. The two men rolled down their windows and talked in their idling vehicles. After a while one of them handed the other a cigarette, then a lighter. Farther down the levee an old negro, wearing camouflage fatigues but no shirt, pushed a loaded shopping cart. The basket leaned to the right with all the crushed aluminum cans and piled blankets and pillows and empty milk jugs that dangled from that side. The negro used a crutch to help him with his bad leg, but the cart’s wheels kept getting stuck in the soft dirt and he had to jiggle the entire frame back and forth, side to side, until he freed it.

  She stayed gazing down at the water through the chain-link fence. The current eddied in a couple of places, then continued forward, indifferent to people on the bank or the bridge that stood in its way. The sun reflected off the river in a way that made the water appear to be not quite as green and putrid as she remembered it.

  A gust of cold air washed over her as soon as she opened the glass door. A dozen or more men and women waited in the two lines. An older female officer stood behind a computer station, scanning each card. She had dark pockmarked skin and grayish hair cropped as short as the male officers’. The men and women in line looked forward, some with their heads bent and their eyes cast at the floor, as if awaiting Communion. The first woman in line wore a pink blouse, a gray cardigan frayed along the bottom, a plain black skirt, and black cushioned shoes. She carried a plastic woven bag that held her purse and her work apron, which was tucked away to one side. How long do you plan to stay? the female officer asked. Just for the day, to shop, she answered. The officer waved her on and motioned for the next person, a young woman holding an infant with tiny studded earrings, to step forward. The officer asked if the child was hers. The woman said yes, that she didn’t have anywhere to leave her while she did her shopping. But the baby was born on this side, the mother assured her. From her purse she pulled out a plastic sandwich bag that held the folded birth certificate. The officer looked at the document, then at the mother, then over at the baby, as if the child might be able to corroborate the story. The officer halfway smiled and gestured for the mother and child to continue on. By the time Socorro reached the station, a new group of women had lined up behind her. The male officer only glanced at her card before motioning for her to continue on her way, even adding, “Tenga buen día.”