Once when Lara was small, when she was Saeedah, her father slipped two gold bangles on her wrists while she slept. The next morning the bracelets surprised her. How tight they were. How she couldn’t slip them off without bending them so that they were lopsided, no longer perfectly round. But they reminded her of Baba, so she kept them in a velvet box and one day brought them to America, where she sold them to pay for the mole removal.

In Aspiration, a landscaper named Chris Tanaka steals her heart.

The town is home to a grocery store, a department store, an army surplus store, three bars, a Greek pizza place, a drugstore, two Mexican restaurants, Jimmy’s Nursery, and a vacant elementary school. Aspiration enjoys 269 sunny days a year, according to a sign outside town. It has one radio station and no banks, but that doesn’t matter to Lara, because she keeps her savings in cash in an envelope in her sewing hamper.

In Aspiration, she realizes it isn’t her black hair and brown skin that has invited men and women to speak Spanish to her at city bus stops and in the aisles of grocery stores and in doctors’ waiting rooms, but also the way she rolls her Rs. Redondo, Aspiration, RC Cola. She used to resist the identification, but here she goes with it, not letting the fact that she doesn’t speak Spanish impede her. She nods yes, as though she understands. This gesture of acquiescence gets her in trouble one time, when a woman thinks Lara has agreed to bum her a smoke. Lara sticks her hands in her pockets and takes them out, empty. Shakes them. The woman angrily walks off.

Sometimes white men in Aspiration and nearby towns whistle at Lara, and she ignores them. Sometimes they ask if she’s a Native American. Sometimes they catcall when she is walking to or from the bus stop alone on her way to work and call her “mi corazon” and chuckle and say, “Talk to me, beautiful. No habla Englais?”

She never tells Jimmy, the nursery’s owner, about the idiots at the bus stop. He must explain to customers and delivery people ten times a day that he is Indian-from-India.

He looked at her funny when she asked for the job and first told him her name.

“You look Indian, like me. I guess Lara could be Indian.”

His brother teaches at San Francisco State, and Jimmy could, too, he says—he has a PhD in linguistics—but he prefers to be in the middle of nowhere with dirt under his nails.

“I much prefer plants to people, as you can see.”

She never finds out if his name is adapted to English, shortened.