The woman’s husband comes around Christmastime. The woman’s husband is handsome, with legs too spindly for his body, like a gazelle in a suit. Isabel walks him to my counter and says, he needs a cream for his dry skin but nothing that smells too flowery. Then she walks away to browse shoes, and I tell the husband about our line of men’s products in blue-black containers that suggest sailorly conquest and rapacious strength. I’m sorry for my wife, the husband says, she sounds so dumb sometimes. I don’t know how to respond, so I say do you use a daily antioxidant to battle signs of premature aging? He frowns and walks away. I place a hand on the cold glass counter and picture it cracking under my weight. I am thin and wispy like a bowl of feathers, like crumpled paper tumbling in the wind. Nothing cracks in my presence.

At home, Mario nods off again. All he does lately is sleep. I make dinner and set the table, but he does not wake. I curl beside him on the couch and say hello, I am home, but he does not wake. I lay my head over his chest and listen to his heartbeat and I kiss his chin. Love me, I whisper. Look how happy we are, I say.

I don’t understand why you don’t at least come home, my mother says. I mean, just to visit. I’m not saying you need to live there.

We are sitting in her car and it’s pouring rain outside, the kind so dissipated it almost looks like it’s raining in reverse. She is dropping me off at the mall after taking me to get a haircut. She is wary now of giving me big chunks of cash but wants me to do my hair at her fancy place anyway.

A woman needs to have presencia, she says, and then she starts going into her thing about how she always puts on a full face of makeup every morning even if she’s just staying home and doing nothing, which I will never understand.

Mom, I say. You should leave him.

Who, your dad? she says, laughing. She is staring straight ahead at the water hitting the windshield like how she sounds typing with her long, perfectly round nails.

Do you realize he just lies in bed all the time now? she says. Do you realize how sick he is? I mean, I’m the one who has the power now. The seats in her car are heated, which seems like such a waste in Miami, but I’m comforted nonetheless, tucked into the nest-like embrace of warm leather. I try to make myself smaller, shrink deeper.