How far away that glamour feels from the campo, not so much in an economic sense but because news is slower, time trickles. There are luxury stores that sell Versace to tourists in La Habana now, but here oxen still till the land and my grandmother just wants a place to buy cumin that isn’t a flight away. She says cumin has disappeared.

“It was me,” I say to Maydelis, and all we can hear is my grandmother’s humming.

“I know,” she whispers, and I wait for her to ask me why but she doesn’t. I wait for her to ask why so I can confess that I think there is nothing I will ever be good at and no way that I will ever make up for the person I’ve been.

“You know,” Maydelis says, fanning herself, “I thought after this—after we’d met each other for the first time like this and spent all this time together like this—I thought you might send for me. I might try for a visa. I thought you would help me like that, but I realize now you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t do that for me.”

“Of course I would!” I say, but she is right and I am stunned. I want to say that it’s not so easy, that I am a screwed-up recovering addict who lives in a moldy apartment and that I can barely support myself, much less someone else, and I almost, almost want to say, It’s not that bad here, but then I know she’s liable to ask me why I don’t stay then—and I don’t have an answer.

She walks away. Pulls a cigarette pack from her back pocket and leaves through the door.

I start to follow, but my grandmother sidles up beside me with a spoonful of the chicken stew, blowing over it. “Prueba,” she says, and sticks the spoon in my mouth.

I can taste the tomato, garlic, onion, the cumin she’s just run out of. The fricasé burns my tongue, but I say, delicious.

She takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen. We pass the bookshelf. “I shouldn’t have assumed Yosmany took it,” my grandmother says, turning to me, and I know that Cuba belongs to me even less than I ever believed.

I say nothing, but I pick up the book again and it feels heavier than before. I turn to the page with the faint ink and hold it up to the light as she watches me.

We are force, the ink reads in perfect script. Such an inscrutable thing to write in a book.

I look at my grandmother and think, I am forced to love you. But then, You are forced to love me too.