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sweet.
    It would come to her.
    “That would be impossible,” Elena replied, “because that title belongs to me.”
    He turned, his mouth lifting on one side.
    She said, “I’ll see you Friday.”
    It startled him, but he covered with a nod, tossing his shirt over his shoulder as he headed out.
    Elena stayed where she was.
Trouble, trouble, trouble.
Something cold walked down her spine, and she looked for her ghosts, but none were there, or at least, they did not show themselves. Shaking it off, she took a breath and turned off the light. “I need to cook,” she said in case they were listening. “Let’s go see the grocery stores.”
    And then Isobel was there, wandering in from another room. “I wanted to see where he went from here,” she said. Her teenager hair was as glossy as fingernail polish. “That one is broken, I think. Be careful.”
    Elena nodded.
    “You need to call Mama,” Isobel said, putting a hand on the counter, admiring the space. “Dolores is sick.”
    The usual thread of resistance spun itself around her spine. “I will. Later. Come on. Let’s go check out the stores.”
             
    Kitchens were often the only safe place in Elena’s world, and when she needed to think or rest or feel centered, she headed right for the stove. This afternoon, she wanted to find out what kind of ingredients she could buy off the shelves here, what would have to be ordered.
    As she headed toward the grocery store she’d found on MapQuest before leaving the apartment, she heard her sister’s nudge again, “Call Mama,” and knew she needed to do it. Mama, who was Maria Elena, was technically Elena’s grandmother. Technically, because her real mother had abandoned her, so Mama took the role.
    Elena’s father, Roberto Alvarez, had gone into the Army during Vietnam. The second son of the family, all proud, poor farmers in New Mexico, descended from the Spanish conquistadores who settled the area in the 1700s, Roberto had been born with wanderlust. When a recruiter showed up at his high school one day, Roberto joined the Army on the spot. He did his basic training in El Paso, where he met Donna DeWalle at a 7-Eleven store. Donna was fifteen, ripe as a peach. Roberto, lonely so far from home, fell in love with her in three seconds flat.
    Donna, fast and busty and blonde, was the daughter of a bartender at a roadhouse that did a brisk business serving soldiers. She, predictably, got pregnant—and this being before legal abortions, they got married at a justice of the peace just before Roberto shipped out and got himself killed six months later. Before he left, he made Donna promise to name his child either after him if it was a boy, or after his mother, Maria Elena, if it was a girl.
    Elena, the little girl born on a windy moonless night, was left a lot to her own devices. Donna was a party girl who left Elena with her own mother, Iris. All three lived in a little apartment nearby the roadhouse where Iris worked, and Elena had her own bedroom overlooking the river. Mexico was there on the other side, looking much the same as America. But it was different. Everyone said so.
    She went to school with migrant workers and played jacks with the children of soldiers and learned that she was very smart. Every year, she was the smartest girl in the class, and there was one reason why—they lived right around the corner from a library.
    Elena’s grandmother Iris loved reading, especially big sagas by the likes of Sidney Sheldon, and historicals and gothics by the thousands—Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart and Norah Lofts. It was her escape. She didn’t drink and she didn’t like people very much and thought television was idiotic, so she would sit on the porch and smoke cigarettes and read novels. To this day, when Elena heard someone cough in that rattly, heavy-smoker way, she had a flash of Iris reading, her breasts spilling over her ribs and down her sides beneath a housedress, a light shining over her