“For my Porter,” is scrawled at the bottom. “For my wandering star girl. Hopefully this helps you find your footing on this green earth, too. Don’t get too lost in the big, vast universe.”

Mom sends a little money along every few months. Grace never touches it, so the amount grows in her savings, and so does the pit in her stomach. She doesn’t make a lot at the tea room. She already feels enough guilt that Colonel helps her out so much. It doesn’t help that Mom does, too, from running the orange grove Grace barely finds the time to visit.

Her failed job interview leaves a sour taste on her tongue. People would kill to have the cushion of their parents’ money, but it makes her anxious. They won’t support her forever. They definitely won’t if they find out she’s been storming out of sterile, white interview rooms and leaving sterile, white interviewers gaping behind. When they find out she got drunk and happy and hitched to a girl whose name she does not know.

Sharone rubs her back. “Car’s here,” she says. “Go home, Porter. Everything else can wait.”

Grace says, “You don’t have to worry about me. Promise.” Her stepmom becomes a distant shadow as the car pulls off. Grace texts the license plate and picture of the driver to her group chat and stares out the backseat window.

She picks a star and wonders if her rosebud girl can see it from her radio station in Brooklyn. Are you listening? There are so many things I don’t know how to say. Can you hear them? Is it just me out here, sending messages into the void?

The drive is silent, but Grace listens the whole way home.

Four

This is the thing: for as lonely and solitary as Grace feels, she is not alone. She has Raj and Meera. She has Agnes. To the very marrow of her, down to the studs, she has Ximena. Raj and Meera are her family, not blood, but flesh and spirit and heart. Agnes is her best friend. Ximena is who she will grab on to when the world ends, and they will watch it burn to ash before they follow. They are two girls with their backs against the wall, and on the very good days, Grace likes their odds.

She meets Ximena for the very first time at the hospital where Colonel is recovering. Ximena wears lavender scrubs and a Dominican Republic flag pin on her name badge. They’d told Colonel just a few days before they would need to amputate above the knee. It’s been years of braces and canes and gritting his teeth against the pain, being a Porter, and suddenly being a Porter means losing another piece of himself.

Grace knew his leg wasn’t right when he came home from his last service tour overseas. He’d been gone eighteen months that time, and he came home like the shadows were waiting to engulf him. His leg buckled underneath him when he walked, and it kept him bedridden for weeks at a time. So, he sat, and he waited for the shadows to come, and eventually they did.

The doctors take his leg. They slice through it like meat for a butcher. The hospital assigns him a companion to help with his recovery. A companion is not a nurse, they say, but someone who keeps you company in the aseptic, miserable rooms. Grace visits, but she is not a companion to Colonel. She is an unwanted witness to his weakened state.

The companion’s name is Ximena Martínez.

She stays with Colonel while Grace juggles working at the tea room and graduate classes. When she makes her daily appearance at the hospital, Ximena is always there, sitting at Colonel’s side reading a book or texting on her phone or engrossed in a telenovela on the hospital’s mounted TV. She gives Grace a smile when she comes in. Sharone is usually there, too, and they leave to let Grace and Colonel have their fifteen minutes of stunted conversation alone.

“I’ll call your Mom back,” Sharone murmurs quietly on her way out, squeezing Grace’s shoulder. “She’s been worried about you, too.”

“Porter,” Colonel says once they are alone. He looks more like himself each day. Grace hadn’t recognized the drugged up, pain-ridden man that inhabited this hospital bed before. He says, “You know you don’t have to come visit every day. I’m sure your studies keep you decently engaged.”

Decently engaged, he says, like Grace doesn’t spend every stolen minute at work shoving printed words into her eyeballs. Math and science and numbers and the minutiae of the universe in perfect size-twelve font for her consumption.

“It’s nothing,” Grace says. Sharone comes every day, and he never tests her resolve to visit. “Porters have a responsibility to family,” she says, like a recitation.

Colonel lies back in the hospital bed and makes a satisfied noise. He glances toward the TV, still in Spanish. “That girl,” he says. “I don’t understand her.”

“Ximena?” she asks. “She’s supposed to keep you company.”

“Unnecessary,” Colonel says, voice bland. His hair and beard have grown out. He looks unkempt and human. “She keeps turning on these soap operas. I can’t understand them, but she seems to find them riveting.”

Grace had a roommate in undergrad who watched telenovelas religiously. She came back to the dorm between classes and found herself immersed in story lines that were universal in content, if not language.

“They’re not bad,” she says. He watches the drama unfold with poorly disguised interest. “Do you want me to turn it up?” She is careful to keep her amusement to herself.

Colonel looks at her. His face has never given much away, but she sees his eye twitch. “Give me the remote, Porter,” he says, “and then get out.”