Dolores pushed open a window. “Tostadas. What else could I afford?” He ignored her remark. She cut slices of bread as Carmen peppered Daniel with questions.

“Why was work so many days?

“Where do you sleep or do you just work for days and days?

“How come you didn’t even come home for lunch?

“What did you eat?”

“Café café café,” Elena said, toddling on the ground.

“Both of you—quiet.” Dolores slathered butter on a piece of bread. Outside, the chickens, causing commotion.

She would wait until night. Whatever she was going to do, she would have to do it at night. She toasted the bread on a pan, flattened it with a foil-wrapped brick, and pictured her own head crushed beneath that weight.

“I’m going out to look for a paper,” Daniel said.

“But your bread?”

“When I get back, you can make me another one. I can’t sit around. I’m too excited.”

Relief. A few minutes to herself. Maybe even an hour if he stopped along the way to chat up neighbors and townspeople. The sun was out. The town would be buzzing.

As it was, Daniel took even longer. She paced and then cleaned to ward off her anxiety and then paced some more and then cleaned some more. She wondered what Daniel had felt when he killed a man for the first time and if it’d happened from afar, with a gun, or if he’d faced the man whose life he took, if Daniel had looked him in the eyes. And after? Did Daniel feel powerful? He’d decided a fate. That’s all it was, killing a man, squeezing the time line a little. Who knew if that man Daniel had killed would have died anyway, struck by a car in a year or contracting an awful disease. Perhaps Daniel had spared him a worse fate.

Daniel left for three hours, and the whole time Dolores was sure Carmen and Elena wondered why their mother kept saying she loved them, why their mother wouldn’t stop hugging them.

Dolores said they should celebrate. Daniel even gave her cash who knows from where to buy a whole pig from a neighbor, and they slaughtered it, made a hole in the ground, and left it to roast all day. The pig had screamed as Daniel slit its throat, and all Dolores could think was Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe.

She got him drunk. Glass of rum after glass of rum. Some with Coca-Cola, bright and popping in the glass. Some pure, dark rum with an ice cube, frothy fire down the throat. She feared he’d grow angry as he drank more; it happened enough. But he was too elated from the victory that few even knew about yet, unless they were also glued to the radio. Jolly and red faced into the evening, swinging the girls in circles and promising them dolls and gifts.