Her mother. Pearls, slacks, wrinkle cream, a box of blank thank-you notes. Always put together. Always carrying a whiff of her own success and composure like a cardigan at the shoulders. You look at her and just know: here is a woman with answers. So often Jeanette has wondered how she came from such a woman. So often she’s felt both gratitude and embarrassment on her behalf. Jeanette: always a woman on the verge of cracking. You look at Jeanette and think: here is a woman with stories.

Not that Jeanette’s mother doesn’t know loss herself. But it’s a different kind of loss. Her mother lives among the Cuban elite, the First Wave, the people who lost homes and businesses and riches and ran from communism at the start of the revolution. Jeanette assumes she’s like them. She can only assume. She has started writing letters to her cousin Maydelis in Cuba and new little threads have emerged: that her mother lost her father young, that her grandmother hasn’t heard from her mother since she left so long ago; that she’s tried but Jeanette’s mother wants nothing to do with her, because of “politics,” her cousin says. Maydelis has a relative with internet access at work and she called Jeanette, asked for her email. They are around the same age and had spoken on the phone periodically growing up. But online they struck an easy friendship, and she’d sparked Jeanette’s curiosity, a desire to someday go to Cuba and meet this family she’d never known.

Jeanette suspects a deeper loss, too, one her mother won’t express. Her mother laughs with abandon sometimes before catching herself, before recasting her face with dignity, poise. Jeanette suspects a different side of her mother, a smooth easiness unworn by the hard edge of new worlds, lapping at the shore of the life she abandoned. Jeanette has seen this loss in photos Maydelis has sent, photos browned with age, her mother’s youthful gaze like time will never stop, like the future is an abstraction, a given. And Jeanette has wondered whether loss unspoken becomes an inherited trait.

“What are you going to tell him when he visits on Monday?” her mother says.

“My probation officer?”

Jeanette’s mother smiles but her cheekbones stay in place, her skin pulls. She cups the espresso in her hands.

“Someone will come for her before then,” Jeanette says. She can hear Ana giggle at the TV in the living room.

“And if they don’t? It’ll be the same for the girl. Whether the PO takes her Monday or the cops take her now. The only difference will be whether you get in trouble.”