In South Carolina they became used to stares, absorbing hisses from locals of Go back to where you came from while Mauro and Elena pretended not to understand. Sometimes when Mauro was out alone, someone would mutter terrorist at him, as if he were one of the hijackers whose faces plastered the news.

At a gas station, Mauro went inside to buy his Saturday Powerball ticket. Two starchy men followed him out to his car, walling him between their bodies and truck.

“Where you from?” one said, more accusation than question.

Mauro didn’t respond, and the man grabbed him by the neck while the other punched him again and again. Mauro hit the ground, nose bloody, a tooth lost in the gravel. There were witnesses, though nobody said anything as the men sped off in their truck or made a move to help Mauro stand.

When the pet-food plant announced layoffs, there was an exodus to Georgia and Florida, where other workers said there were more factory and farming jobs. Mauro insisted the family go north instead. Elena wondered if even with their homegrown war, Colombia wouldn’t be safer for them. But then Perla would remind her the latest peace negotiations with the guerrilla commanders had been a fiasco, and of the day of the new president’s inauguration when an explosion killed fifteen near the presidential palace despite the high level of security; and the massacre in Bojayá, where hundreds of townspeople were murdered and wounded in a church beside a school, including dozens of children. Even the crucifix was left dismembered. It happened far away from the capital, all the way on the Pacific coast, but it was still our country, our dead, Elena thought. Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country’s victims. The turn of the millennium showed no end to the violence. Elena knew in every war it was the innocents who paid, but in this American offensive, all foreigners could be perceived as the enemy.

Mauro spent most evenings in the common room with other workers, drinking beer they took turns buying for the group. Elena wanted to wait to talk to him when he was at least only half-drunk, but those moments were becoming rarer. She called him into their room. The children were asleep on the bed. Mauro and Elena sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Through the window, the misty phosphorescence of the factory lights. They’d already been given notice to be gone by the weekend.

“I’m tired of moving, always being strangers, having people look at us like we’re a plague,” Elena said. “We didn’t come here for this kind of life. Let’s go home.”

She felt his beer breath warm on her face as he sighed. “We’re young and healthy. If we don’t spend these years trying to make a better future for our family, when will we? I’m not ready to give up.”

“I miss my mother.”

“Do you want to end up like her, spending your life in a house breaking down all around you? If we stay we can keep sending her money until she decides to join us here.”