I took one forkful of eggs but they made my stomach flip. My mouth tasted dry, like it was full of crushed wads of paper. My scalp ached around every hair.

“Was everything okay last night?” she asked. “After you got back?”

I knew the look in her eyes. I knew what it meant. I hated that she was right.

“It’s always been this way,” I said. “With your mother, I mean. Even when we were young. It was like she knew me—not just who I was but who I’d be in ten years, thirty. She always thought I was a slut.”

Stella shook her head. “That’s not a word she uses.”

“She used it once,” I said. “With me.”

“She’s not perfect. You know I…God knows I talk about it. But with this, with how you’ve been or what you’ve done, I don’t think she judges it.”

“I don’t think,” I said. “I know.”

“You don’t know. You just assume.”

“You hear yourself?” I shook my head. “Suddenly you’re her biggest fan?”

“She’s not all bad.”

“You talk about her like she’s pretty bad.”

“She’s my mother. You’ve got to understand that. My mother.”

I stood up and scraped my eggs into the trash. “I’m late, like you said,” I told her. “I should get to work.”

Work was getting worse each day. Everyone else came into the office and sat down and got up, sat down and got up, and it seemed like it wasn’t any trouble for them. But I was restless. I must have looked like a fool, always rustling my papers, uncrossing my legs and then crossing them the other way. I caught myself staring into space. Not space, really. The wall of my cubicle, my stupid photo of the desert. When I heard the word desert, I’d think about that postcard instead of the actual place. I took it down and threw it away. All day I was typing reports that no one ever read. My fingers felt like they had individual stomachaches. My knuckles got creaky. I’d been avoiding Toledo since we’d seen her in the park. She still sat outside the office during lunches, glancing in my direction, but I hadn’t done anything to fix the shame I saw in her eyes.

Everyone else had a real life somewhere else. Ted had his television shows. Stan had parades of flapping flags and lovers. Omar had a beaming wife much taller than he was, at least in photos. His daughter had a lace dress as white as milk. She had a fondness, he said, for these swarms of flies that came off Lago Nicaragua. Diablos pequeños, he called them. Little devils. Hated by everyone but her. He missed her very much. I miss a lot, was what he said, and he meant things in particular: two of her birthdays, kitchens full of folks eating fried platanos and beans, and her first Communion, when she told the priest the wafer tasted like a brick. I miss a lot.