on the curb stood out among the parade of the lost on Thirty-ninth Street first for the startling photograph she presented as a calling card, an image of Isabel’s bungalow before the floors sagged and the doors and windows were encased in steel, and second because the children she had with her were obviously not hers. Isabel detected a faint coloring of Oaxaca or Guatemala in their skin—perhaps she was their aunt or cousin. But there was something decidedly non—Latin American in the air of pampered curiosity with which they sized up Isabel and the bungalow. They reminded Isabel of the children she had cared for in Pasadena when she worked there one summer, boys who knew the abundance of expansive homes with unlocked doors and clutter-free stretches of hardwood floor that were swept and polished by women like her. Why was the Mexican woman dragging them around these parts, where the only white people she saw regularly were the policemen and the old man who collected the rent?
“What are you looking at?” asked the Other Boy behind her. “Why are you on my bed?” His name was Tomás, he was eleven, and he had lived with Isabel and her son and daughter for two years. The Other Boy was an orphan, and under strict orders to be quiet and grateful, and to bother her as little as possible, though he was constantly forgetting that last commandment. Isabel turned and gave him a scowl that involved a slight baring of her pewter-lined teeth.
“¡Gallate!” she snapped.
Tomás raised his eyebrows, smiled, and turned away, unfazed, returning to the movie he was watching with Héctor, Isabel’s son and Tomás’s best friend on earth, and with María Antonieta, Isabel’s daughter.
Isabel found her natural provincial generosity once again pulling her toward the front door and down the stairs. These small-town instincts had gotten her into trouble before—the Other Boy being the principal reminder of this. But she sensed that outside on the curb there was a woman in a situation much like her own: alone with two children and the Other Boy and only the twice-monthly visits of the father of her children, Wandering-Eye Man, and his cash stipend to make the situation livable. Her ex had visited the previous weekend, which was why Isabel had had her nails and hair done, but all she had accomplished with that was to make his eyes fix on her for a heartbeat or two longer than usual.
When Isabel opened the door, Héctor, María Antonieta, and the Other Boy paused the movie they had been watching on their DVD player and the three of them followed her out the door and down the stairs.
Isabel leaned down and asked a question softly of Araceli. “¿Tienen hambre? Tenemos hot dogs.”
“Hot dogs?” Keenan shouted. Before Araceli could answer, her charges were rising to their feet and following the three children into the bungalow. Araceli mumbled a “Gracias” as she scrambled after the children and up the three stairs through a doorway whose wood moldings had been painted and repainted so many times over the course of eight decades they seemed to be made of clay. They entered a room where the floor nearly disappeared in the impossible clutter of furniture: a secondhand sofa of coarse fabric, a dresser, two beds, a television, and assorted shelves squeezed between walls of much-abused plaster that held the memories of the dozens of families that had lived there, including a clan of worn-out farmworkers named Torres.
When Keenan and Brandon stepped into this space, their eyes were drawn to the alabaster face of a motionless woman on the television screen. She was holding a large white scepter and wearing a crown of crystals, while riding a chariot pulled by a panther. “Hey, this is a cool movie,” Brandon said as he and his brother dropped themselves to the carpet, to watch the image atop the dresser spring into movement, while the three children in Isabel’s care positioned themselves around their guests, all five children craning their necks upward to watch an elaborately staged battle unfold between the stacks of folded clothes and towels that framed the television on either side. Brandon’s eyes were momentarily drawn to the tall votive candle burning on one edge of the dresser: the flicking flame illuminated Saint James the vanquisher of the Moors, a sword-wielding man on horseback trampling people underfoot, an image that suggested that the memory of warfare and conquest was alive among the inhabitants of this home.
Araceli followed