Not until morning, when all that was left was a pile of ash and Dolores looked down at her body covered in blood and soot and sweat and could have jumped into the fire herself. But what of Carmen and Elena then? She’d done what needed to be done. She’d had no choice. She would spread the word—of her hero husband, a martyr who died bravely in the mountains. When people would claim they’d seen him, she’d question their dates, play the confused grieving wife. She’d tell the girls their father had left again, one final battle; it wasn’t victory yet like he’d said. She’d stand at the road as the parade heralded Fidel Castro through the streets in a couple of days and she would weep, she would laugh and weep and wave, she would hold her girls in the air and tell them the time for crying was over. She would dance.

How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she’d seen her father’s face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.

11

OTHER GIRL

Jeanette

Miami, 2006

The first time I see the woman, she is buying cold cream. What she wants, she says, is a moisturizer that doesn’t feel heavy, doesn’t sit on her skin like so much weight. I lay out her options: whipped argan oil, cold-pressed and refined; our new microbeading exfoliating lotion with gentle 7 percent alpha hydroxy; the bestselling hyaluronic-acid-plus-B-vitamins gel with all-day-stay technology, patent pending. Her red fingernails tap the counter as she slides a credit card with her other hand. She buys all of them.

I can’t take my eyes off her. She reminds me of my mother. I think this is what draws me to her, what makes it so I can’t take my eyes off her. I haven’t seen her, my mother, in a month. I have only one day off from the store each week, and I have to choose: spend my day off with her or with Mario. My mother doesn’t know about Mario. She only knows I have a job again. I haven’t lost it again.