He drank at work sometimes, which got him fired more than once. At meals, even when Elena asked him to help by feeding one child so she could feed the other. But at the hospital after Talia was born, he promised, his head resting beside Elena’s deflated abdomen, the child swaddled and asleep in the plastic basinet next to the bed, that he would never drink again. He’d found a church and knelt before an altar to Saint Jude, patron of the impossible, and begged for assistance in giving up the bottle.

“I want to be better,” he told her. “The kind of father people remember for honorable reasons. The kind of father neither of us had.”

He was the only man she’d ever been with, ever kissed. She knew Mauro had always seen her as a kind of seraph. It didn’t bother her. Perla said it was normal for men to exalt the women they love. That’s why so many had mistresses and why brothels were always busy. But Elena had the same desires as anyone else. When she met Mauro at Paloquemao—lean and long-haired, brows downturned in fatigue, in the moth-eaten ruana he wore till he saved enough to buy a flea market leather jacket—though he wasn’t like the more educated or family-bred boys she knew, he had an elegance she could not explain. She remembered how she thought of him after their initial market encounters, the tide of love beginning to roll over her as she worked at the lavandería, hoping with every jangle of the door chain that the next customer would be him.

Since they came to the north, there were moments when Elena considered taking the children and leaving him. But she convinced herself every woman experiences the same temptation. Real love, her mother once told her, was proven only by endurance. Elena’s impulse was always to stay, to remain a complete family. No matter where or how they lived, she was certain their chances of survival were better together than apart.

SEVEN

The landlord arrived unannounced. Weeks after Talia’s birth someone anonymously reported seven people living in the apartment above the pizzeria when only two were on the lease. Mister and Madame tried to keep the landlord in the living room, but he made his way to the second bedroom and found Elena and the three children asleep on the pullout couch by the window overlooking the alley. Mauro was in the shower. There was only one bathroom for them all, and Mister and Madame asked the family to bathe within certain hours of the morning or night so as not to disrupt their routines. When Mauro emerged, dressed with hair damp, he found Karina and Nando crying. The baby, however, was silent, eyes following as her father and Mister and Madame tried to reason with the landlord, as if she knew before anyone how all this would turn out.

The landlord called it unlawful occupancy, because of the number of tenants and because three out of the family of five did not have permission to be in the country. He said he could not risk being fined by the city, that harboring “illegals” was some kind of crime, he suspected, though Mister and Madame insisted that wasn’t true. He warned the couple that if they tried to hide the family in their home, he would change the lock on the door and have them evicted.