The sun had set now, the evening had turned chill, and Alejandro still had not returned. They realized he was not coming. “Perhaps something has happened with the wagon,” she said. “He does not like me much.” She gathered the plates before Ram could say no. She helped him scrub the dishes in Kishen’s tub. He sensed she wanted to work alongside him, that with the telling of her story, she felt unburdened.

“Buenas noches, Ram,” she said, drying her hands on her skirt. “Thank you for the food. Gracias.”

He could not meet her eye. “It is nothing.”

He didn’t watch as she walked back to the Eggenberger house. On his cot outside, in the darkness, he could not sleep. She loomed too close. He could not remove from his mind how she had told him of herself, reaching across a border, how she had become real, unpolluted, clean. What had he thought before? He could not remember. The moon was full, illuminating everything: the alkaline earth, the scrub, the growing cantaloupe, the Eggenberger house. In its glow, the distance between the two homes seemed like nothing. He remembered her crying in the shed by herself when she nursed the mare. He felt her tidal pull across the ancient ocean bed.

Now he rose from the cot and walked the distance between the houses. He did not know if he would knock, or just stand for a blessed moment and then return. When he drew close, the door opened. How long had she been watching him?

Had he ever hesitated about the touch of her foreign skin? He stepped forward and embraced her, burying his face in her hair. When he pulled away, she leaned forward and kissed him. Then he felt sure of himself.

He led her to the back room, and they lay on Karak and Rosa’s bed. The smell of the desert earth came to him: the fields that he had tilled, the lands he cultivated as his own although they were not. The scent of her skin, the smoothness of her hair, her humanness, this overwhelmed him. To be touched, after five years, as if he were somebody, this overwhelmed him too.

It was only in the morning that he wondered: Had he gone to Karak’s bed out of bitterness, as a way to be his equal?

23

THEY CONTINUED. IT WAS NOT ONLY THAT ONE WEEKEND, WHEN THEY embraced in the animal shed, aware of the horses’ soft warm breath, or on his rickety cot outside, which he feared would fall underneath them, or back again in Karak’s home. It went on and on, after the family came back from Stockton. He would see her on Sundays after he talked briefly with the men at Fredonia Park, while Karak and Jivan stayed with the others. He could sense Karak’s eyes following him as he left.