It’d been four years already. Ana and her mother were still in Mexico. She’d known almost as much life in Miami as in Irapuato.

Here, she worked. For a US-born woman with flowing red hair. Doña Nancy. Well, technically she didn’t work for Nancy. Gloria, her mother, did. But Ana had always helped her mother, for years she had helped her mother, and Nancy finally offered Ana pay. The previous muchacha had started working in a kitchen when she was eight years old after her father died. As a girl she’d been able to buy shoes for all her sisters, and this had been a source of great pride. Ana heard her tell Gloria this story before the woman left her post to marry.

“I want to work too,” Ana had said to Doña Nancy some years back. Nancy had said no but agreed to give Ana an allowance for helping her mother. Plus Ana wasn’t going to school; Gloria taught her with books Nancy brought home from the middle school where she taught English. So Ana was working, but she wasn’t. It was all very confusing. She spent all her time around adults.

Nancy liked everything really, really hot. She liked a quesadilla that could set off a smoke alarm when you unfolded the tortilla. She liked her soup still bubbling in the bowl. If you served Nancy food, and it wasn’t scorching hot, Nancy would frown and then she’d get up and microwave her plate. So Ana charred everything, skirted burning every meal. She often scorched her fingers taking plates to the dinner table.

You learned these kinds of things about people, their habits, their eccentricities, when you worked for them. Ana knew Nancy better than Nancy’s own husband, who sometimes sought Ana’s advice over a birthday gift or anniversary plan, which her mother thought was an outrageous thing to ask a child. Sometimes he’d even ask Ana about Nancy’s schedule.

For instance, Roberto probably didn’t notice that Nancy never wiped her feet on the bath mat when she got out of the shower, instead leaving a trail of watery footprints that required listening for the turn of the faucet, the opening of the bathroom door, so Ana could be ready with the mop.

Roberto probably didn’t know that Nancy smoked cigarettes sometimes while he was at work and then hid the carton in the upper-right drawer of their shared wardrobe between the neat rows of panties Ana folded each week.

Or that Ana had caught Nancy kissing her Spanish teacher in her driveway one morning while Roberto was at work and that no one said anything and Nancy had given her mother a raise two days later.

That Nancy liked to fidget by stretching a hair tie with her fingers, or picking at a piece of thread, or scratching off her nail polish.