“No, I didn’t tell him I was coming either. But I am going to call him …” Esperanza’s voice trailed off. She hadn’t seen Rubén since they broke up, but she wasn’t surprised at Sofi’s question because mother and daughter had always been that way, anticipating each other’s words. The truth was that she hadn’t come home just because she missed everyone and all during the flight to Albuquerque she had thought of calling Rubén because no kind of white woman’s self-help book and no matter how many rosaries she prayed, would result in giving her spirit the courage she got from the sweat lodge and which she surely needed now more than ever.

“Where are they sending you?” Sofia asked. Don Domingo stopped watching television and stared at his wife, who he realized had taken Caridad’s mutterings seriously.

“Saudi Arabia …,” Esperanza answered. She smiled nervously as if she wanted it to sound like Paris or London or even Los Angeles but there was no way that this faraway and frightening place could be made to sound inviting. She looked at her mother, then at her father, then at La Loca, and she saw in their eyes that despite their naïveté about the things that happened in the world, they were well aware of what that assignment meant. So many men and women throughout the state had been shipped off in the last months because of the imminent global crisis.

Don Domingo, who had barely got past high school himself, was proud of his college-educated, career-oriented daughter, but what had the world come to when a daughter also went off to the frontlines of a war as part of her “career”? What business did she have there and what right did her bosses have to send someone so obviously unprepared to defend herself?

While Domingo was still away from his family, imagining his four daughters growing up without him, he was actually glad he hadn’t had no sons. When he was drafted for Korea, he had claimed mental instability and was made exempt. In his youth he belonged to a theater company and it was easy to improvise a performance for the draft board that sent him home rather than to war although he had to undergo a week’s testing in the hospital first. Call him a pacifist or a chicken, Domingo did not believe in war, which he felt only benefited los ricos.

It had not occurred to him that a daughter could be as enticed by the idea of serving the military as a son. In any event, when he went back home, he was happy to find them all there, pretty much minding their own private lives. So what kind of trick of fate was this now to send his only college-educated civilian daughter off to war?