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couldn’t understand why they asked God for another child as if we three weren’t enough. I put a finger on my belly button and reminded myself about the cord that tied me to Mami. I told myself that as long as that cord existed, she wouldn’t forget me, no matter how many other children she had. But Papi, what connected me to him? What would keep him from forgetting me? In his sleep Carlos couldn’t hide his sadness, and some times in the middle of the night I’d feel something warm seeping into my dress.

    The day after the telephone call, Mago refused to go to school, and Carlos had to walk there by himself. Mago spent all day in the room we shared with my grandfather. She grabbed one of Élida’s old history books and flipped through the pages until she found a map. She kept tracing a line between two dots, and because I couldn’t read yet, I couldn’t make out what the letters said. When I asked her what she was doing, she showed me the map. “This is Iguala. And this is Los Angeles, and this,” she said as she made her finger go from one dot to the other, “this is the distance between us and our parents.”
    I touched my belly button and said, “But we’re connected.”
    She shrugged and said there was no such bond. “I just made that up to make you feel better.”
    “You’re lying!” I said. I kicked her on the calf and ran out of the room with a finger on my belly button. I hid in the shack where I was born and traced a circle around the spot on the dirt floor where my umbilical cord was buried.
    Someone shouted my grandmother’s name from the gate, and I went out and saw Doña Paula had arrived. We didn’t have running water, so Doña Paula would come every three days to deliver water to Abuela Evila from the community well. Her donkey carried two large containers on either side. Her two little boys would ride on the donkey while she walked alongside it, pulling on the reins. The older was my age and the younger was three.
    “Buenas tardes,” she said to Abuela Evila as she led the donkey through the gate.
    As always, she pecked each of her sons on the mouth as she helpedthem get off the donkey one by one. I tried not to look, but my eyes were glued to Doña Paula, to the way her lips pressed against the soft flesh of her sons’ cheeks, the mark they left. I thought of my mother, of the kiss she had given me the day she left, of the fact that her lipstick had rubbed off all too quickly. I tried to recall what my mother’s kiss had felt like, but I could not.
    “Look at those little jotos,” Mago said from behind me. “Being kissed by their mami.” She went back into the house, murmuring something about them being a bunch of sissies and mama’s boys.
    I stood there watching Doña Paula’s sons, thinking that there had once been a time when my own mother had kissed me, but now she would soon be leaving the imprint of her lips on another child.
    “Jotos,” I whispered under my breath. And making sure that their mother wasn’t looking, I stuck my tongue out at them.
    “Regina, tell your sister to go buy Doña Paula a Fanta,” Abuela Evila told me as I stood there by the patio. I nodded and did as she said.
    “Why doesn’t she go get her the soda?” Mago said. “It’s not like we get any of that water.” The water Doña Paula brought was dumped into the tank and used for washing dishes and for Élida, my grandmother, my aunt, and my grandfather to bathe with. If we wanted to bathe, we had to go to the community well to get our own water and bring it back in buckets. One time Mago slipped and almost fell into the well, but while she held desperately onto the rope and dangled in the air, Carlos and I grabbed her feet to get her back to the edge. We only bathed once or twice a week because it was a hassle getting the water, and since no one told us to bathe, we only did it when we felt like it. That meant we were nearly always covered in dirt and our clothes looked as if we had mopped