“Yeah? Hey, how’s it goin’, kid?” he asked with his usual condescending manner, adding a little chuckle. Esperanza paused. He talked to her on the phone like she was a casual friend. A casual friend whom he prayed with and whom he made love with, but whom he could not call to ask on a given day how she was doing. When it was her moon-time the estrangement between them widened since she was not permitted to go to the meeting or to sweat, nor did he like to make love to her. A casual friend who accepted her gifts of groceries, the rides in her car with her gas, all up and down the Southwest to attend meetings, who called her collect the month he left on a “pilgrimage” to visit the Mayan ruins throughout southern Mexico, where she had not been invited to join him, who always let her pick up the tab whenever they stopped someplace for a few beers and burritos just before she left him—after the meetings, sweats, lovemaking, to go home so she could get herself ready for that job which he suspected her so much of selling out to white society for but which paid for all the food, gas, telephone calls, and even, let’s admit it, the tens and twenties she discreetly left on his bedroom dresser whenever she went over, knowing he could use it and would take it, although he would never have asked her directly for it.

“It’s my sisters,” she started to say, but already something else was on her mind more pertinent than the recent recuperation of Fe and Caridad.

“Yeah, your sisters,” Rubén said. “You got your hands full, huh, woman?”

“No,” Esperanza responded with sudden aloofness. “As a matter of fact, they’re taking good care of themselves. I just wanted to tell you that I’m accepting an offer in Washington. And that I think it’s better if we just don’t see each other anymore, Rubén.”

“Well, uh …” Rubén was groping for a response that would reinstate the pride just demolished by Esperanza’s abrupt rejection, when he was cut short by a click. Esperanza didn’t mean to simply hang up on him but she had just caught sight of a man peering in through the kitchen window. What made it really eerie was that instead of barking the dogs were waving their tails. Just then the man opened the door and stepped in. She recognized him right away since she was already going on twelve when he had left. “Dad?”