He says it like a question and my grandmother and the man look at me like they expect a response.

“Horses?” I say. The sun is setting and the mosquitoes are out in full force. I slap one on my thigh and it sticks to my skin, a tiny carcass.

“You want to ride one?” Yosmany asks. Something about the way he smiles reminds me of Mario and I feel the familiar gut punch, the craving.

“No,” my grandmother answers for me. “It is dark. She does not want to ride one.”

“But I do,” I say. “I want to ride a horse.”

Yosmany smiles and I want to lick his teeth.

My grandmother takes a long breath and places a hand on the cane that leans against her rocking chair. “Maybe tomorrow.” She turns to Yosmany. “We are busy catching up. I have not known this granddaughter of mine in her twenty-eight years. Plus we go to sleep early.”

“Coño, Abuela,” says Yosmany, and it bothers me that he calls her grandmother, because I have just gained possession of her for the first time. I am not ready to share.

“How’s La Yuma?” Yosmany asks, looking at me. “Is it everything they say?”

I start to answer but my grandmother cuts me off again. Some moments I want her closer, and then my feelings flicker, switch. I grow annoyed. I think of Maydelis’s mom, my tía Elena, saying that all her life my mother acted like she didn’t belong in the family, had been born into a family beneath her. That she spent all her time in her room and often exploded in anger at my grandmother over any little thing. And then I kind of feel it too, that maybe I was wrong to think there was something here for me, a recognizable piece of me.

“I wish this country would become completely capitalist,” my grandmother says as if exhaling smoke. “I wish it would. Then you would see what capitalism really is. You kids, you have no idea because you didn’t see it. You’ll see what it really is.”

“Coño, Abuela,” Yosmany says again.

“I am tired. I’d like to go to bed now.” My grandmother folds her fan in her lap. It depicts colonial scenes, women in hoop skirts and their gallant men.

“Pero don’t get mad, Abuela,” Yosmany says.

When he leaves, my grandmother’s cat Theo jumps onto my lap. He has a piece of lace in his mouth, and she has no idea where it came from.

I stole a lacy thong once. In high school, I walked into a Victoria’s Secret and stuck it in my pocket. The clerk who caught me was named Victoria, which cracked me up. My mother fetched me from a room behind the store, where a security guard lorded over me, eyes on my cleavage. He “let me off easy.”