In the spring he worked picking citrus fruit out of the irrigated desert of Phoenix. After the season he headed south like some weary migrating bird, back over the border, through the turnstile, down the street to the bus station, and from there, the all-night drive, with its comforting whispers as it bumped along whatever road would lead him home, to Nopalillo, to his wife and children.

But his broken promise to the dead girl haunted him. How it had happened, he wasn’t sure, but sometime during that first night, with his mind drifting in and out of consciousness, she had become an emblem of his survival. Of the two faces forever branded into his consciousness, it was El Turrón’s that kept his anger hot, but it was Estella’s that softened his bitterer moments. Her face became more familiar to him than even his own wife’s. Once or twice when the trickle of work swept him further west, out of Arizona and into California, he’d thought about delivering the letter. Tried to imagine himself walking into the University of California, but then what? Without the child, he would be no more than the bearer of bad news, yet he could not bring himself to throw it away. Instead he rolled it like an ancient archaeological map, secured it with the strip of Estella’s dress, and placed it in the wooden box at home where he kept things he valued the most.

There were constants in his life: men he got to know from the orchards, the better farmers who employed them, a coyote he fell in with en route and came to trust. And if he knew that life was difficult and lonely for him, he knew, too, that it was just as lonely for Marie Elena waiting back in Mexico with only a wire transfer once a month to keep her company. So he kept his aspirations low. To earn enough money for his wife to be happy. To return often enough for his children to recognize him. For these reasons he tried to find work as close to home as possible. He hugged the line, picking avocados, melons, lemons, inhaling the pesticidas, sleeping on the ground, avoiding the thorns, because even in one short season he could make more money than any of his sisters’ husbands could in a lifetime.