She’s out collecting the mail when she spots the sheriff’s car coming slowly down the road toward her house. Instantly, she is alert, some instinctive reaction, like seeing a hornet in her vicinity. She runs down a checklist. What could she be doing wrong? On the top of the list would be the small brown undocumented man cleaning her gutters. But Mario has finally made it to the back of the house. Antonia lifts a hand casually in greeting, a performed rather than an innocent gesture. One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Would the sheriff recognize Hamlet? Most of the law enforcement in town are local boys whose family farms have gone under. Many didn’t even finish high school, thinking they’d end up farming. Besides, as Sam often reminded her with a bemused chuckle: not everyone in the world walks around with a whole bunch of famous people talking to them in their heads.

Once she’s inside, she hurries toward the back of the house, sliding open the glass door off the living room. Ven, ven, she calls out. Rápido, rápido! La migra! she adds to hurry him. It works. Mario scrambles down from the ladder, missing a rung, and bounds toward her, still clutching a fistful of leaves.

She hurries him inside, points to a chair in the corner, out of view of any windows. Harboring a fugitive, the phrase runs through her head. What Sam would have done, unquestioningly. He was the bold one. She, the reluctant activist, though everyone assumed it was she who was the political one by virtue of her ethnicity, as if being Latina automatically conferred a certain radical stance.

Mario glances around the room wildly. Does he think Antonia has laid a trap for him? There’s a knocking at the door. Who could it be? Stay here, tranquilo, away from the windows. In the driveway, the UPS truck is already pulling away. The book she ordered that’s supposed to help with grief lies on the welcome mat. Antonia checks the road again: the sheriff’s car has stopped at Roger’s. Good thing Mario’s here. But then there’s José, Mario’s co-worker, perhaps cleaning stalls or mixing the feed, or if he’s on break, napping or listening to his tapes of Mexican music in the trailer behind the farmhouse.

As Antonia watches, the sheriff gets back in his cruiser and heads down the road, turning right at the corner, toward the rumbly bridge, where there’s a pull-off. Time for his lunch, riding beside him in a cooler, or maybe he’s meeting someone he can’t invite home. Antonia has heard he’s divorced, living with his mother.

Years ago, Mona talked her and Sam into making an annual donation to their local sheriff’s fund. They send you a sticker, Mona explained. You put it on your car window. You’ll never get a ticket again, I swear.

Smart cookie, baby sister Mo-mo. But Sam was doubtful. Another one of your sister’s theories. Let’s try it for a year, Antonia persuaded him. Against his better judgment, he had affixed the sticker to their Subaru.

That was over five years ago. They haven’t gotten a ticket since.

Other people are sometimes right, she reminded him. Other people, meaning her sisters, herself.

I never said they weren’t. He was too damn quick with his comebacks, right even about not always being right.

Roger comes to collect Mario. What’s he doing? Putting on a new roof or what?

She takes the blame. She had him come inside. Sheriff was on the prowl.

Came by my place, too, asking how things were going. Somebody’s talking. Roger looks at her pointedly, so she feels she has to deny that she has spoken to anyone. Why would she endanger one of her own?

Roger shrugs. A shrug that implicates her whole gender. Women. Always talking. They talk when they’re having their hair done; they talk waiting on line at the grocery store; they talk when they stop by to pick up their Thanksgiving turkeys from Roger’s honor store.

He’s in the living room, Antonia says, stepping to one side for Roger to come in, casting a look at his dirty boots. She considers asking him to remove them, as he seems to have missed the hint of shoes lined up below the mudroom pegs. But she might as well ask him to take off his clothes. No way this old Vermonter’s going to walk around in stocking feet indoors.

Mario is not in the living room where she left him, but there’s a fistful of leaves piled on the seat of the chair in the corner.

Mario! she calls. Es el patrón. To Roger, she says, he probably got scared. I told him it was la migra.

Roger lets out an audible sigh. Women overreacting. Mario! he calls in a commanding voice. They hear footsteps coming down the hall. Someone else who didn’t remove his shoes. But what unsettles her is that Mario took the liberty of hiding in the bedroom wing, a private part of the house.

Took the liberty? Sam would have challenged her. What does that even mean, when you are facing deportation?

Me agarró el temor, Mario says. Grabbed by fear. Personification is not merely a literary term, she used to tell her classes. Literature has to pull its weight in the real world or else it’s of no use to us. It’s not just Sam at dinner parties who could get in high dudgeon. Mario is holding himself, presumably to stop shaking. The red string bracelet he wears as a talisman on his left hand dangles its two loose ends. Suerte y protección, he had explained, wincing as she bandaged his hand. A lot of good it did you, she thought but didn’t say, concentrating on administering the first aid she’d picked up from Sam over the years. She had felt such tenderness then, and now again, at this boy-man who believes he can tame the dragons with a piece of braided string. No different from her literary cache of salutary lines. Tranquilo, tranquilo, she calms him. Estamos en Vermont. Here there be no torture of prisoners. He stares back, unconvinced. The world is crazy. Who knows what angry people will do.

Maybe you should wait a while before you take him back, Antonia advises. If you can spare him a little longer, I could use his help with a few things. Windows to wash. Lawn furniture to haul out of the shed. She makes up a list of improvised chores to delay his return. Best not to mention the promised phone call.

Roger scowls, looking them both over, probably suspecting they’re up to something. Okay, but I need the ladder back. Roger heads out the front door, and moments later his pickup pulls into the backyard, where she and Mario are waiting. After the two men load the ladder, Roger points to his left wrist, where he’d wear a watch if he wore such things. Be back by the afternoon milking.

Sí, patrón, sí, Mario answers, in a voice so submissive it pains Antonia to hear it.

Roger drives away, the ladder poking out the back of the lowered flatbed. Antonia notes the red plastic ribbon tied to one end to alert cars to keep their distance.

Mario pulls out a wallet from his back pocket. Monogrammed RL, Ralph Lauren? A fancy brand for a poor man, but then most of these brands are now pirated, cheap imitations sold on city streets by migrants in stocking caps, calling her over in accents from Haiti, Mexico, Ethiopia, countries she isn’t sure where they are on the map. Burkina Faso was the last one that took her by surprise. Remind me where it is, she had asked Sam, as if she had only momentarily forgotten. She didn’t want him teasing her about one more deficiency of her Dominican primary school education, adding her poor sense of geography to her deplorable math skills. He wouldn’t let her reconcile their checkbook.

Tucked inside the sleeve of Mario’s wallet is a worn piece of paper. Soon it will disintegrate with all the unfolding, refolding. Mario holds it out to her. Estela, written in a rough hand, then an area code and phone number. That’s all? she asks, and he nods. I thought for Mexico you needed more? Yes, you do, but she is not in Mexico. She is in Colorado. The way he pronounces the name, it sounds like a state in Mexico. But no, his novia has already crossed over. Estela has encountered some problem with being released. The coyotes have refused to put her on a bus to Burlington.

A bus cross-country by herself? Antonia questions. Does she speak English? Does she have her passport? What if she’s apprehended? Furthermore, does la novia have her parents’ consent? Does el patrón know?