The woman reminds me of my mother because she looks breakable. But also immaculate. Breakable and immaculate. I see her almost every single week, and she always shops during the day, like so many other women. She wears red-soled heels, carries snakeskin bags. Looks like she smells of Chanel No. 5—no, something even more expensive, that Jean Patou thousand-dollar bottle with ambergris from sperm whales and eight thousand jasmine flowers. I make ten dollars an hour, but the lexicon of wealth still roots in me. I can’t scrub my childhood off. You’re simply and unobtrusively classy, like a Celine bag, I say to her in a daydream.

The same day she buys cream from me, the woman tells me her name. I say Isabel is a beautiful name. I get the feeling that she doesn’t want to leave the counter; she lingers. Her skin is so bright and taut that it glistens. It is the skin of expensive facials, chemical peels. Things I do not seek at nineteen. You have beautiful skin, I say, because I do not know what else to say. My mother has the same skin, and I see her leaning into the mirror sometimes, running a finger over each cheek, examining her pores. She is fond of telling me that she, too, used to have skin like mine. That I ought to stay out of the sun. As if the sun is my problem. As if my problems don’t flourish under the glare of artificial light.

The other reason I haven’t seen my mother in a month is that I refuse to see my mother in her own home—once my own home—as long as my father is there. She doesn’t understand. He’s sick and I should see him, she says. He can’t even drink anymore, she says. But I don’t go home and she doesn’t come to my new home and so we always meet in some café or Cuban restaurant—and on most of my days off, I don’t want to go. So she just calls and says, Are you okay? And I say, I’m okay. And she says, Can I go see you? And I say I’m busy and she sighs a lot and then there is just so much silence on the phone that we hang up because neither of us can handle so much silence.

The same day of the face cream and the woman-like-my-mother, Mario nods off on the kitchen table, where he racks up a line and I eat dinner by myself because he isn’t hungry all night.