Engracia flicked a feather duster across these surfaces. She thought about Diego’s room, for the short time they had lived in Las Vegas together. It was a closet, really, but there was a small window and room for his bed. Apart from that, there had been almost nothing in it: just an old jacket of Juan’s spread on a stool and a small pile of books from the school book fair.
When Juan was detained, Engracia knew she would have to leave Pomona. She told Diego that it would be better if they were far away; that her papers might also be inspected, that they would have to lay low for a while. Her friend Pilar had suggested Las Vegas. It was cheaper than California, especially now, because the economy was so bad. And there were still jobs in the casinos, if you knew someone, and Pilar did: Engracia could work as a maid in one of the old hotels. Engracia didn’t want to move because Diego was happy with his friends, and this was the only world he’d ever known.
But she couldn’t reach Juan. The only reason she knew he was still in jail, just sitting there, was because Ramón had told her. Ramón knew things, knew people everywhere. Engracia had asked him when Juan would be back, but Ramón had not replied. He had shaken his head, said times were tough, and that Juan had been caught already twice before. Engracia did not tell Diego that Juan was still in jail, that he was waiting to be deported, or that she was running out of money and could not afford their apartment.
That night, Engracia tossed and turned, and then finally threw up in the toilet. This was why Pilar had talked about Las Vegas. She had known that Engracia would be on her own, would need someplace easier than Pomona—cheaper, with steadier work. Engracia resisted, but only for a few days. This was not the hardest thing she had done. It was easy to do hard things for her son.
She had crossed the border when she was sixteen, with a friend of a friend of Juan’s. Engracia had found out she was pregnant, and she had known she didn’t have much time. If she was ever going to leave, going to follow Juan, she would have to do it now, before the baby was born. And so she had. She had done this enormous thing on her own, without telling her mama or her papa, without kissing her little brothers good-bye. She’d given birth in a hospital filled with women like herself, and the nurse had not concealed the anger she felt at what Engracia was doing, and Engracia had had to force herself not to care about the nurse, not to need her, as her body twisted and gripped. In her mind, she thought that this pain could not be right, could not be normal, but of course it was normal, and she gave birth to a perfect Diego, who waited to cry until the doctor rubbed his feet, and then stopped crying the moment that Engracia took him in her arms.
Afterward, Engracia asked for a piece of paper and a pen. She wanted to write it all down, everything that had happened, so that she could send it to her mother. This is how tired she was: she knew her mother didn’t have a phone, but somehow forgot that she didn’t know how to read. Engracia could not send the letter. If she sent a letter, someone would have to read it to Mama. Her brothers were still too young yet, so it would be someone from the village. It would embarrass her mother to hear someone read aloud Engracia’s words: about what it had been like to give birth to Diego.
Juan had not been there. He was working, moving farther and farther north, but he had made it back in time to take her and their son out of the hospital, to bring them, carefully and solemnly, to the little apartment in Pomona. She had been so proud of Juan, who had gotten them a place to live, just one big room, but all theirs. They had not shared it with another family. And this is where they had lived for nine years. She and Juan and Diego. By the time that Engracia left, the apartment was unrecognizable from the room they had first taken. Juan had painted the walls yellow, and Engracia had made everything herself: the curtains and the bedding and the flowered cover on the couch where Diego had slept with his thumb in his mouth, and the sound of his suck, suck, suck like an ocean lapping.
They had been happy. She had known Juan since before her quincea?era—they had met at the parade for Nuestra Se?ora de Guadalupe—and as soon as she turned fifteen, he had made the long walk from Jerez to her village to find her. Juan was older, and he had already been to the United States, already worked a few seasons in a raisin plant. He was full of ideas for what they could do, for how they would live, for the lives their children would have. In the meantime, they could send money back to her family.
And this was what they had done.
Engracia was proud to help her parents, proud that her brothers could go to school, proud that her papa, who had hated working in the States, could stay and grow peppers on the land on which he had always lived. These were not hardships: she and Juan enjoyed the life they had made. They liked being in a city—in an American city. They liked taking Diego to the park, and watching people on the streets, and buying ice cream on Fridays when they got paid. Diego was a funny little boy, and he made them laugh. They would play on the floor with him for hours. Juan used to invent silly songs, and Engracia was not too shy to dance in the park, or to run wildly down the beach with her arms above her head on the days when they took the bus to the ocean.
There were all those good years to shore her up, and if she had been capable of crossing a border and having a child and making a home when she was sixteen, then she could certainly find a way for her and Diego to live until Juan got out of jail. This was not even hard, it was just life. She still had the rent in the box they kept hidden. Engracia had ignored the landlord pounding on the door, ripped the sheet of paper from the door without reading it. She would have to go quickly, and she was sorry that there would be no time to let Diego get used to it. She picked him up at school on Friday, after getting his records from the office, and told him they would be moving to Las Vegas on Sunday. Even though Diego was already nine, he cried, and begged to stay a little longer. But because he would be afraid if he knew how little money they had, she did not explain why she refused.
Her son was subdued on the ride up I-15. They stopped at McDonald’s, and she bought him everything he liked: the double cheeseburger with bacon and a Dr Pepper and a hot fudge sundae. They sang “Hay un hoyo en el fondo de la mar” for miles, and she made sure Diego beat her each time. For a while, it was fun, but as they got farther from Pomona, after they crossed the Cajon Pass and drifted down and past Victorville, even Engracia felt daunted. She pointed out the giant thermometer in Baker, which didn’t seem to be working, and Diego looked out the window, at the desert stretched brown and barren and relentless as far as the eye could see. Cars were strung along the freeway like seeds on the backside of a fern, and the sun beat down even though it was January. They finally saw what they thought was Las Vegas in the distance, but it was merely a collection of overeager casinos at the state line, with a huge roller coaster in the parking lot, and just after that, a low concrete building, ringed with barbed wire, in the middle of nowhere.