It was late. The children asleep. Mauro called from the police station. They got him, he said. He was in the minivan when two cops started knuckling the window.

Elena’s first thought was of the dead woman at the motel. Maybe after finding out he worked there, they’d try to pin something on him. The hours in solitude before he called made her feel anything was possible.

“Were you drunk?”

“No. I promised you no more. I was thinking what to do about our situation, and I fell asleep. Just a nap. The car was parked. I wasn’t in danger of hurting anyone.”

Since they’d bought the car, they’d known there was increased exposure. But Mauro had never even been pulled over. He’d learned to drive from Tiberio with military precision and obeyed every traffic law as if he’d written it himself.

“How can they arrest you for sleeping?”

“They can do anything they want.”

“Just tell me when you’re getting out.”

He said he’d passed the breath test but they arrested him for not having a valid license or insurance. There would be a hearing later. For now he needed her to ask Mister and Madame to lend them five hundred dollars so the police would let him go home.

Mauro reached out to a friend of a friend in New Jersey who said the family could stay with him for a while, and there were plenty of businesses hiring in the area. The police had impounded the car, so Mauro and Elena left the few pieces of furniture they owned to repay Mister and Madame their debt and took a bus to Newark. In those days there weren’t border control agents patrolling bus stations like there are now. They sat the five of them in a row meant for two. Mauro held Nando and Karina, a child on each knee, while Elena held the baby. Dante met them at the station and took them to his home in East Orange. He was from Buenaventura and lived in a big house with his Honduran wife, Yamira, her son, and nine others; a mix of relatives, friends, and people like Mauro and Elena who had nowhere else to go. They let the family have the basement since the previous occupants had just left for jobs at a meat factory in New Paltz.

Yamira had a degree in economics but showed Elena how to clean houses. Elena asked what was so complicated about cleaning that it needed to be taught. She grew up working in a lavandería, and Perla kept their house as impeccable as a surgical ward. Elena couldn’t leave her bedroom each morning without her bed made, clothes folded, floor swept, everything in its place. Yamira insisted cleaning for Americans was different and if Elena wanted to get jobs that could earn her a hundred dollars a day in the right neighborhood, she would have to learn to use their chemical products, operate an American-style iron and vacuum cleaner. She’d have to learn to clean fast, too, unless she was being paid by the hour, in which case she could draw some tasks out.