While doña Felicia would have wanted to keep Caridad’s traila just as she had left it the day of her disappearance—with the red Formica kitchen table and four red-and-white matching chairs (only one of the chairs needing reupholstering badly), the flea-market wooden-trunk coffee table that the mexicano merchant who sold it to Caridad swore he bought from some indios in Chihuahua, the foam futon single bed that doubled as a couch and all the little things, the silver and glass nicho with a papier-mâché skeleton on a cart inside and the three-dimensional picture of La Virgen de Guadalupe, San Martin Caballero, and El Santo Niño on the wall, which Caridad had brought to make her little trailer “home”—out of economic necessity she was forced to rent it.

Usually, doña Felicia had a nose for sniffing out unreliable tenants from the dependable ones, but this time she really missed the mark. She gave Caridad’s furnished traila to a young couple with a baby on the way, feeling compassion for their troubles rather than listening to her own better judgment, since neither was employed at the time they moved in and whether or not they could afford it remained to be seen. They gave her the first month’s rent and only half the deposit but their sad faces and promises to make good on it in a few weeks managed to soften doña Felicia, who in any case could not stand to see an expectant mother without a home for her future baby.

But baby to come or no, within a few weeks doña Felicia did not receive the other half of the required deposit as promised. Instead there arrived more family members who never left the young couple’s trailer. First there was the young man’s mother and two teenage siblings. Later came the wife’s sister with her three small ’jitos. As if that were not enough, after that the sister apparently reconciled with the father of the children and then he moved in. This last moocher had un parna who supposedly helped him do odd jobs for a living, and although this one spent his nights, unless it got too cold, sleeping in the truck they used for their work, he did use the traila’s bathroom facilities and joined the rest inside at mealtimes.