The hippies are welcoming. They invite Lara and Emma over for dinner and let ten-year-old Emma hold their baby and carry him around in a Guatemalan striped sash wrapped around her torso, not too different from the muslin wraps Lara’s mother and sisters used years ago to tote infants in Jidda. The hippies’ house is full of sun. The bead curtain between the kitchen and the living room clicks like a misbahah when they pass through to drink sun tea at a table the husband, Toby, made out of the kitchen door. The pots of basil and rosemary on the windowsill above the sink smell better than the marijuana the hippies grow, Lara thinks. Dog hair drifts along the hardwood floors, but the hippies keep their golden retrievers in the bedroom after they see the panic on Lara’s and Emma’s faces at the sight of the animals.

“They’re real gentle,” says Eleanor, the wife, as she leads the dogs away, her fingers hooked into their collars.

Lara doesn’t tell her that she and Emma have never been so close to a dog in their lives.

They ask a lot of questions about where she’s from, and she smiles and pretends sometimes not to understand, sometimes not to hear. They make guesses: Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico.

Emma tugs Lara’s jeans. “Is that where we’re from, Mom?”

Once, Eleanor says how much she admires single mothers, who cares what people say, and asks Lara if she’s divorced. Lara lets Emma answer. “My Daddy’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Eleanor says, and the next day leaves a basket of tomatoes at their door.

After a month, Lara decides the marijuana in the hippie backyard is a bad influence on Emma and the neighbors are too nosy-friendly. She and Emma move over a brown hill to a beige shotgun house with a stone patio in the back and a cherry plum tree in the front. She smells weed. The town is full of hippies, it turns out. On the weekend Lara and Emma run into the original hippies in the tiny downtown. They coo over the baby.

“You’re here,” Eleanor says.

“Right on,” Toby says.