She says a woman with a baby had a court date yesterday and they got to stay. Credible fear, Alegra says. Asylum, she says. Have you gone to the CFI prep yet? The volunteer lawyers?

CFI prep? I say.

Credible fear interview.

Credible fear? I say.

You can’t say the wrong thing, Maura says. You tell the truth but it can still be the wrong thing. You can’t be nervous.

I look up at the sky and think what use are words.

Texas heat is sometimes dry, like flying just above a burning house. Breathing a heat that rises, that burns the lungs. In Texas, my body is sucked dry.

Sometimes we can see oil stacks burning in the distance from this yard. When the sun sets, the Texas fields are burning in the horizon. Nobody comes to this part of Texas, nobody but oil workers and us. We must be families made of bird. If we are families that nobody wants, we will want one another. We are families made of birds and we will save one another because no one else is coming. I hug Alegra and cry again. I cry into her shoulder.

Dinner is a square of bologna, slick, a little slimy; a square of white bread, half thawed; a square of corn kernels. Water that sometimes tastes of bleach. Milk is for the children. Unlike lunch, dinner is with the children. But I am the only one who does not have a child with me, so after I finish, I offer to hold babies for some of the mothers so they can eat. I hold the babies who are too little for baby food. The babies who are still suckling on their mothers or hungrily drinking from bottles. The electric outlets are covered when not in use and none of the tables have sharp edges. There are high chairs. This is a jail baby-proofed for babies who should not be in jail. But they will not remember, I tell myself. They will not remember, unlike Ana who is not a baby anymore or even a toddler and she will remember.

I go back to the social worker but he takes me to a blue-eyed man, a guard or a worker or the government, I don’t know anymore.