Chapter 23: Sunday in Rosenberg

Emiliano's mother lived in a yellow house in Rosenberg with a pecan tree and a chain-link fence.

She was waiting on the porch when I turned into the drive.

She was a small woman in her sixties, in an apron.

She did not wait for me to unbuckle the car seat.

"Give her here," she said. "I've been told she has her father's nose and her mother's temper."

"That's about right."

She lifted Camila out, and Camila looked at her for a long, serious moment and then grabbed her glasses.

"Good grip," his mother said, and laughed.

Emiliano stood in the screen door behind her, in a clean white shirt, with his hands in his pockets.

He did not come out.

He looked unsure whether he was invited.

Lunch was rice and chicken and a pot of beans, and his mother put the biggest plate in front of me.

"Eat," she said. "You're thin."

I ate.

She watched me for a while.

"Forty dollars a night, I cleaned offices," she said. "Seventeen years."

"My son tells me you lived on forty dollars a month."

"Mamá," Emiliano said.

"I know what that is. I know what it costs."

She put a spoonful of beans on my plate.

"Nobody should be hungry in a house with a roof. You eat here whenever you want."

I could not answer.

I nodded, and kept eating, and my eyes stung into the beans.

After lunch she took Camila into the back room to look at a drawer of toys that had been Emiliano's.

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