But to reason with Daniel. She’d whispered her concerns one night as they lay in bed and thick rain lulled them to false calm. How quick he had knocked her to the floor, said she probably wanted to open her legs for Batista, slashed the belt across her face so that a welt formed diagonally from the bottom of her left lip to her right eyebrow. She feared her husband more than any president or his men.

The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, the guerrillero Fidel Castro made a plea from the mountains: Come with your rifles, your machetes, it’s time. That’s all it took. Daniel grabbed his straw hat and the blade he used to cut cane on his patrón’s farm. Dolores didn’t know how long he’d be gone or if he’d live. Just a few days of missed work meant she would have to feed the girls whatever was ripe on their little plot—some boiled plantains or malanga or, worse, a handful of nísperos, glasses of sugar water.

The day before Daniel Hernández killed a man for the first time, Dolores watched him leave down the dirt road behind their house. He hitched a ride, waved back once. Elena slept in Dolores’s arms. Carmen grabbed her hand and yelled. She asked where her father was off to, work? Dolores lied and said he was visiting family. Carmen demanded to know when he’d be back. Daniel wore the same clothes he wore each day he worked the fields, left the same way he left each morning. But somehow Carmen sensed a different current to today’s departure. Perhaps Dolores too eager to wave goodbye.

She told Carmen she could miss school that day. The girl quieted.

And, aside from no money for food, how nice to have the house to themselves. Dolores swept and dusted, mended Carmen’s school clothes, knocked down ripe bananas with a wooden plank.

Later, they took a bus to the capital of the province. Carmen stood on the vinyl seat, nose glued to the window, and Elena wailed in Dolores’s arms before collapsing into sleep. At the plaza, Dolores let the girls run free, Carmen dangling over the edge of the fountain, wiggling ripples into the water, Elena toddling at Dolores’s feet. Dolores had no plan, no reason to be in the city. The best kind of feeling, to do something for no reason. She wanted to scream, wanted to dangle over the fountain like her daughter, force miniature waves with her fists.