Mauro didn’t respond, and the man grabbed him by the neck while the other punched him again and again. Mauro hit the ground, nose bloody, a tooth lost in the gravel. There were witnesses, though nobody said anything as the men sped off in their truck or made a move to help Mauro stand.

When the pet-food plant announced layoffs, there was an exodus to Georgia and Florida, where other workers said there were more factory and farming jobs. Mauro insisted the family go north instead. Elena wondered if even with their homegrown war, Colombia wouldn’t be safer for them. But then Perla would remind her the latest peace negotiations with the guerrilla commanders had been a fiasco, and of the day of the new president’s inauguration when an explosion killed fifteen near the presidential palace despite the high level of security; and the massacre in Bojayá, where hundreds of townspeople were murdered and wounded in a church beside a school, including dozens of children. Even the crucifix was left dismembered. It happened far away from the capital, all the way on the Pacific coast, but it was still our country, our dead, Elena thought. Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country’s victims. The turn of the millennium showed no end to the violence. Elena knew in every war it was the innocents who paid, but in this American offensive, all foreigners could be perceived as the enemy.

Mauro spent most evenings in the common room with other workers, drinking beer they took turns buying for the group. Elena wanted to wait to talk to him when he was at least only half-drunk, but those moments were becoming rarer. She called him into their room. The children were asleep on the bed. Mauro and Elena sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Through the window, the misty phosphorescence of the factory lights. They’d already been given notice to be gone by the weekend.

“I’m tired of moving, always being strangers, having people look at us like we’re a plague,” Elena said. “We didn’t come here for this kind of life. Let’s go home.”

She felt his beer breath warm on her face as he sighed. “We’re young and healthy. If we don’t spend these years trying to make a better future for our family, when will we? I’m not ready to give up.”

“I miss my mother.”

“Do you want to end up like her, spending your life in a house breaking down all around you? If we stay we can keep sending her money until she decides to join us here.”

“We can sell the house and find another,” Elena said. But they both knew Perla would never allow it, stubborn as she was. Even with her chemical asthma from decades of working in the laundry she refused to close.

“Please trust me, Elena. It’s not yet time to go back.”

* * *

In Delaware, on the drive to the hospital through streets cottoned with snow, Elena tried to find the seam between earth and sky, but there was none. Talia started pushing her way out hours before, but Elena wanted to wait until the baby was absolutely sure it was her moment. There was no time left for an epidural. She didn’t have one when delivering her other children. Elena had only one ultrasound in the last nine months, early on at a clinic across the river in Blades that didn’t require insurance and where she had to pay cash. They couldn’t afford another, and she had no medical care beyond her instincts, but she didn’t worry. In Texas she’d had plenty of scans and checkups, and the doctors were always telling her something was wrong with her baby, that she would be wise to terminate or he might be born dead or close to it. She didn’t listen, and Nando was born small but perfect. Later she heard from other women who’d been told similar things and given birth to healthy babies too. She didn’t know she would have a daughter until the baby was in the doctor’s hands. With her previous births she’d bled like a slaughtered calf but not this time. The ease of Talia’s arrival stunned everyone.

* * *

On the day of her birth, their home was a small bedroom in an apartment above a pizzeria whose ovens below kept them warm on days the radiator blew out, the scent of dough and cheese filling their walls. The apartment’s true tenants were a couple from Pakistan. Mauro knew the husband from his janitor job at a local motel. He and his wife slept in the other bedroom and told Elena and Mauro to call them Mister and Madame. Mister worked as a front-desk attendant and Madame as a seamstress. Their teenage son died of leukemia years before, so his bedroom was empty and they sublet it to the family for one hundred dollars a week. Elena could only communicate with them in scrambled words and gestures. Mauro mostly took over with the English he’d learned at his jobs.

Nights were cold. The family wore their coats even to sleep, the children released from their blanket cocoons only for changing or to be fed. Karina was three. Nando, two. Madame looked after them so Mauro could stay in the hospital and hold the baby as Elena slept. She shared a room with another woman. The new mother of a boy. Elena noticed nobody came to visit them. She didn’t speak Spanish, but when they were alone she brought the baby to Elena’s bedside and they held each other’s children until her boy cried and they traded back.

According to an American nurse who spoke Spanish, the woman and her son left the next morning in a taxi. Before the hospital discharged Elena, the same nurse came to speak to her. She stood by the bed and asked if her husband was around. When Elena said he’d gone home to check on the other babies, the nurse looked pleased. “Now that you’ve got three little ones, you should think about not having more children,” she said as Elena fed the baby from her breast. “There is a procedure you can have done here in the hospital to prevent you from finding yourself in the same situation again. You don’t need your husband’s consent.”

The hospital people in Houston told Elena the same thing after Nando was born. For a time, she thought they might have sterilized her. She’d heard stories like that back in Colombia. Foreign-aid workers, Peace Corps, and NGOs. How they lured women to clinics offering free gynecological services and the women came out unaware they could no longer have children. When she discovered she was pregnant a third time, she felt a surge of relief that the Texas doctors had left her intact.

The nurse seemed frustrated when Elena said nothing in response. “I know your family is already struggling. How are you going to care for three children with just your husband’s income when you don’t have any other support?”

Elena was uneasy with how the nurse spoke of her babies as burdens. She never thought of them that way. In Colombia people said a baby arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm. Where four eat, so can five. Even Madame told her every baby brings luck to its family. She informed the nurse they lived with a nice couple who helped watch the children on nights when the pizzeria downstairs needed extra hands in the kitchen. The nurse nodded, and Elena assumed she understood they would manage.

When she and her baby were alone again, Elena held her and watched her sleep. This fat glowing child, pale from not having yet met the sun. They’d had many conversations in the months before her arrival. Elena promised she would protect her from harm and felt nudges from within letting her know the baby had heard. She’d made the same vows to her other children, and they lived shelled in happiness, playing in the back seats of the minivan, laughing even while hungry, making up songs for each other those nights they spent at highway rest stops before they found a new place to live, which she hoped would not be etched into memory.

The baby was named Talia for the actress who played the wife of Rocky. Mauro loved those movies, and Elena always thought the wife much tougher than the boxer. Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.

Mauro was never much of a fighter though. At least not with his fists. He found his corner in liquor when he came up against stronger, unbeatable opponents: a supervisor, a landlord, rent to be paid. The winter of Talia’s birth, he drank as if it nourished his cells. When they were teenagers, Mauro and Elena went to parties where they gulped aguardiente and danced cumbia, shared beers and sipped wiskisitos at nightclubs and festivals when famous rockeros and salseros came to town. Mauro was the one who bragged he could drink more than anyone they knew and walk a straight line along the edge of a building. She saw him do it many times on the roof of her house in Chapinero. But now he was belly-bloated and clumsy. He bought cheaper alcohol every time because it was all he could afford without Elena noticing.