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slushy!”
    “Do what your mother tells you,” Esperanza said and pulled the door shut.
    That night, in bed, Eva added a third prayer to her list.
    “Dear God and all the angels,” she said, holding her mother’s hand in hers. “Please help Mamma not to swear.”
    When Esperanza came back, three hours later, she stank of booze and cigarette smoke. She gestured Anna to the door.
    “Is Eva in bed?”
    “She is,” said Anna.
    “Good. I don’t want her seeing me like this.”
      
    It was summer. Things were fast forgotten, soon forgiven. Esperanza instructed Eva in the art of cop interception through some listening device purchased from a drug dealer in Espanola and strove to impress upon them both the futility of geometry.
    “What is she going to do with the area of a square when she grows up?”
    “Espi,” said Eva, looking up from her math workbook.
    “Yes, mijita? ”
    “It’s a rhombus.”
    “Eee, that’s even worse! They should be teaching her how to make money on that thing in New York, no? What’s it called, Anna, that thing in New York?”
    “The Stock Exchange.”
    “The Stock Exchange. So she doesn’t end up like me, living in someone’s house, mopping their floors, doing their laundry, because she can’t afford a transmission, no?”
    “Espi,” Eva said, peering up out of grave eyes. “The reason you never have any money is because you gamble.”
    Esperanza picked up a rag and shook it out. “Hija,” she said, “I have never gambled in my life.”
    Eva approached her mother obliquely a few days later in the kitchen, clearly intending to part with a piece of information of some significance. “Mamma,” she whispered, “Espi has a Taser! A pink Taser!”
    “Why does Espi have a Taser?”
    “I don’t know!” said Eva, her eyes cutting about the room.
    “Esperanza,” said Anna that night over dinner, “why do you have a Taser?”
    “Eee!” said Esperanza. “Because you never know!”
    “Never know what?”
    “Who could be there!”
    “There where?”
    “Anywhere!” Esperanza said, getting up with her plate. She only approached Anna after the girl had fallen asleep. “I got it for Eva,” she whispered, “for when she turns nine.”
      
    It was summer, there were no more mad dashes out the door in the morning, no shrill recriminations with the dog cowering in the back of the truck. Time softened, lengthened, grew more lenient. Eva sat her mother down at the dinner table with paper and pencil. “Do you remember the old house when we had to build the fence for Paco?”
    Anna nodded, thankful those days were gone. She’d turned into a taxi service then, taking phone calls at all hours of the day and night from people whose greeting was, “Hi, you don’t know me but I have your dog . . .” She’d shown up at various residences with smoke coming out of her ears, determined to give the dog a beating, only to have him greet her with such wild abandon she lowered the tailgate of her truck without a word of censure and watched him leap, a great smile on his face, onto the back of the truck and, there, resume position as unrewarded navigator. She had picked a house with a fenced yard after that, and the dog, nicknamed by those who knew him The Forlorn Paquito, became even more forlorn.
    “Yes, I remember perfectly.”
    “You remember the fence?”
    “No.”
    “It was made of metal.”
    “I remember metal.”
    “It’s what we’re going to get for the chickens.”
    “What chickens?”
    “The chickens we’re going to get.”
    The difference between them: Anna had never felt the slightest connection to the ground, not once had she experienced the urge to sink something into it and watch it grow. The mere idea of chickens made her queasy; the duty of recycling or, God forbid, composting, was one that belonged to others, yet her daughter had directed countless campaigns for a vegetable garden, had commandeered their vehicle repeatedly to the recycling plant, and had