You would not pay him for his lessons, the man said. Nor would you pay him for the bed at the back of his house where you would sleep, the bed his own son sleeps in whenever he visits. Your payment, he said, would be to help with the flower harvest. You would not do anything that would stress your wrists, he said. No picking plumeria or cosmos. No twisting poinsettias off their stems. But you would help carry the baskets of flowers, las canastas de palma that would be light with their cargo but awkward with their size.

You wondered if this flower harvest happened every year. You wondered this out loud the first time you ever spoke to me. We were standing, waiting for the señoras to tell us what to do.

I told you no, this does not happen every year. I told you what my bisabuela told me. That a man getting married a village away said his bride was so beautiful, he wanted the clouds to rain flowers in her honor. For their wedding day, he wanted to turn the sky to petals.

Another man, one who had grown up here, who had gone to school and then to more school and become a lawyer, told the rich man that he could make this happen. The sky could rain flowers for his bride.

But he would have to pay.

The rich man had owned shares in the maquiladora, whose runoff had poisoned the creeks, whose trucks had torn up the roads. Then, having found a place they could operate for even less money, they left, taking the jobs and the youngest families, with them, leaving the shell of the factory crumbling by the side of the road.

The village, the lawyer said, would only give his bride her sky full of petals in exchange for these things: Clean water (at the time everyone had to buy gallons from a far-off store, relying on the kindness of friends with trucks). Repaired roads. Replaced electrical lines. A building for the school so it did not have to meet in the back of Señora Delgado-Cruz’s house anymore.

The village would sell him the color off its trees and vines and bushes, if he would pay for these things. And the man was so in love that he agreed.

This is how you came to be in my great-grandmother’s village during the flower harvest, those feverish, bright-colored days of picking and carrying cream yucca petals, the pink satin ribbons of brush trees, the blue lilac of jacarandas.

I came to be there because my parents were sick of me moping on their living room sofa during the hours each day I used to be in dance class.