One-mile walk home under spring skies to save bus fare and relax before the zoo that is my other full-time job. Feet like beaten rocks, crumbly and useless, climb up the stairs to find one, two children, half dressed and dirty, and one husband, good for nothing, sleeping passed out on the plastic couch that I hate, more because he insisted we buy it on credit they shouldn’t have given us than because it is ugly and uncomfortable.

Better that way. Better no matter how irritating to find him like this. No bothering, no harassment, no when-is-dinner-going-to-be-ready kind of questions.

“Where are your sisters?” I ask Fatima, who laughs her cute little laugh that I have no patience for now.

“My sisters got to go with their uncle for ice cream,” she tells me.

“Fatima, please. I’m very tired. Where are your sisters?”

“I told you, Ma, they got to go with their uncle and have ice cream.”

“Who is their uncle and where did they go?” I ask, suddenly feeling a pang in my heart.

“Uncle Hector told them Ma was at work and Baba was asleep on the couch and that two could go for ice cream and two had to stay and could go tomorrow.”

There is no one in our family named Hector. We have no neighbors I know by that name. In fact, I don’t think I have heard the name before, which is how it comes to be that I don’t sleep that night and instead go to the police station with my pile-of-shit husband who didn’t even want to tell the police in the first place because he is so ashamed of himself for not being able to manage to keep an eye on his very own children. I’ll be damned if I leave the fate of those two little girls in the hands of a man who can’t even find a job.

I feel as though my insides are being torn out and I refuse to think of anything beside the fact that the police will find our daughters and they will be fine and Hector won’t have done anything to them.

Early the next morning, which just feels like an extension of the night, I call the Desert Acres Convalescent Home.

“This is Dahlia. I won’t be in today. I have a family emergency.”

“You don’t come today, then don’t bother coming back,” Helga screams into my ear in words I would understand in a whisper.

I am tempted not to go because if I didn’t have this job in the first place, my two daughters would never have wandered off with Hector—and there are still no leads who he is—and I would have had time to warn them about the evils of this society.

“You go to work,” my husband says. “I will find our babies if it’s the last thing I do.”