In the kitchen, Vanessa poured Pepe’s liquor into the sink, and it looked like dark brown blood circling into the drain. Vanessa started to ask after Jeanette but Carmen squeezed past her. She needed to keep tabs on her daughter.

But her daughter sat absorbed in conversation with her great-aunt Mercedes and Vanessa’s brother Tomás, who struggled to hold a hissing Linda in his arms as the cat’s eyes darted from face to face in fear.

“She clearly doesn’t like being held,” Aunt Mercy said to Tomás. Linda began to claw frantically.

“Fuck!” Tomás yelled. He let the cat go, and she darted into the hallway.

“Oh.” Jeanette placed her plate of hummus on a chair and examined the scratches blooming on Tomás’s arms. “Let me get you a bandage.”

“No!” Carmen yelled over the din. “I’ll get it!”

In the bathroom, Carmen closed her eyes. She visualized the cheerful, welcoming hostess she wanted her family to see. Martha Stewart, she told herself. Nitza Villapol. She opened her eyes. Carmen shuffled out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol in one hand and loose bandages in the other.

Mario stood in the middle of the living room with a bouquet of grocery-store carnations. He wore black pants and a thermal much too warm for Miami in November. Jeanette grabbed Mario’s hand and pulled him toward Carmen.

“Hasn’t it been forever since you saw Mario?” she called, her tone artificially cheerful, too nervous and fidgety.

Mario didn’t meet Carmen’s eyes, but he gave her a tepid hug. Carmen wanted to scream at him, blame him for something, anything, for everything, but she tried to remain composed, tried to remain Martha Stewart.

She looked after every detail. Appetizers restocked, toilet paper in the bathrooms, AC temperature right. She looked after every detail to avoid thinking about blood, to avoid looking at Jeanette, to avoid mixing the two.

The conversation, once everyone sat for dinner, was painstaking, fifteen people desperately waiting their turn to insert an opinion, nobody concerned with what anybody else thought about anything. Perhaps every conversation played out like this, and it was only now, aware of every move, every reaction, that Carmen realized it was a miracle human beings learned anything about each other at all.

“So what do you do, Mario?”

“Is there pork too? I always say it’s not a real feast without some puerco asado.”

“I’m in retail.”

“In Cuba, every party, there was pork. Every party, a pig killed.”

“That’s right! No pork, no party.”

“Retail?”